10 – 13. 4. 2013 Energy for emotions Supported by:
VPLT – The Professional Lighting & Sound Association of Germany,
EVVC – European Association of Event Centers
Smartcomm designed an AV system for the Teaching Space at the University of Oxford, based around Crestron control. Shutdown commands have been programmed into the Crestron system so that the room closes down after long periods of inactivity and at particular times of the day
followed during peak consumption to cut down energy usage by a facility to quickly adjust heating and cooling set points, change the timeout setting for an unoccupied room and edit maximum brightness of lighting levels. When the demand response mode is activated, each room is overridden according to the demand response settings.” AV integrators can, and should, be looking at the integration of basic building services as a business opportunity to add to their portfolio of services. This is being done to some extent: within a presentation room lighting and shading are integrated with projectors and sound systems. “All building control systems must be considered from the client’s aspect, which is a non-trivial and consequently expensive task,” explains Graham Naylor-Smith, associate director, consulting at Arup. “There are two significant implications: firstly any AV system, such as an auditorium, must be operational when the client needs it, and with the vast amount of matrices, display equipment and programmable devices that need to be powered up and configured, this can take some time to do, so must be allowed for in the programming. Secondly the AV system should be considered as an add-on to the main services infrastructure, so there needs to be a single point of reporting from the AV system to the building management system in the format they use.”
Cloud technology is affecting the
operation of these services, as Morrison points out: “Cloud computing will have a massive impact on how high-performance buildings are run. Many management and maintenance functions will find their way to the Cloud, making them more accessible over a broader range of applications and geographies.” This is an area that Bloomfield is
acutely aware of: “As a global services firm specialising in commercial property management, we launched a
portfolio monitoring and control system in November and found that corporate executives were ready for a centralised solution. This is now well established with 12 client portfolios managed from a central operations centre in New Jersey. Systems designed for managing large portfolios of owner-occupied properties may use Cloud computing to analyse thousands of data points around the world in real time, looking for trends and anomalies that may identify problems even before they occur. Facility experts can remotely monitor systems across a worldwide portfolio, benchmark performance at similar properties across the portfolio to help guide capital planning and determine when a maintenance or repair issue requires an immediate visit. Cost savings and carbon reduction opportunities are greatly increased and results are more easily measured under these portfolio-wide systems.” Looking even further ahead to opportunities that could provide more return to the AV integrator, Bloomfield summarises: “Despite these recent innovations, smart systems are still in their infancy. The real benefit comes when smart buildings, transportation modes and electrical grids are tied together using Cloud technology in the intelligent cities of tomorrow. We can start to see where this convergence of technologies is taking us, and there are likely to be even more life- changing innovations that we can barely imagine today. Buildings, singly and in portfolios, will be a major component of worldwide efforts to create intelligent, more sustainable cities.”