BUILDING CONTROLS & TECHNOLOGY Placing wellbeing front and centre
The recent pandemic has made us far more aware of our commercial buildings and the importance of being in healthy, properly ventilated spaces. But Simon Ward, director of sales, UK & Ireland – Distech Controls asks… how do we know our buildings such as offices, stores, educational institutions, hospitals and hotels are safe and healthy as we return to the ‘new norm?
M
ore than ever, having a fully functional Building
Management System (BMS)
to ensure wellbeing in non- residential building is critical. A defective system can have serious consequences for the health of occupants by facilitating the transmission of viruses and bacteria. In all aspects of our lives, we expect the spaces we occupy to be healthy and trustworthy so that we can grow, learn, work and consume with peace of mind. Occupants want to know that the building they are entering is safe, that measures have been taken to reduce the spread of infection, that the space is clean, they will be alerted to any problems and that they can have control over their own environment.
The recent pandemic has made us aware of the importance of occupying healthy, properly ventilated buildings. It has also made us question habits and gestures previously considered harmless such as shaking hands to say hello or touching a door handle or a light switch. The current risk will undoubtedly dissipate eventually, but a return to a measure of normality can be accelerated by providing effective and easy to implement responses to reassure occupants of non-residential buildings that their workplace or temporary residence is safe and healthy. These measures can be classified into the two following solution types – proactive solutions that reduce the risk of contagion and reactive solutions that advance optimal risk management if, for various reasons, an infected person comes to visit a building (people tracking). In the first instance, there are a number of proactive measures that we can put in place to make our buildings safer. These include managing indoor air quality (IAQ), detecting occupied spaces, mastering infection control, providing contactless comfort management, ensuring social distancing and identifying people that can have safe access to the building. Let’s look at air quality first. ASHRAE has published a guide for re-opening commercial buildings and has created four key elements building owners should do – increase the ventilation rate, increase rate of air renewal, use HEPA filtration and eradicating viruses and bacteria in HVAC Systems. Once the air quality has been considered, we need to look at how we manage the spaces. With shared spaces becoming more common it’s important to know who is using a space and when, especially for cleaning purposes. The room and desk presence detectors, which record in real time if a space/desk is occupied and keep a record of occupancy over time, allow the facility manager to know the occupancy rate of
12 BUILDING SERVICES & ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEER JULY 2022
the building dynamically or over a period as well as to plan which spaces are to be disinfected in priority. Devices such as Distech Controls’ EC-Multi-Sensor-BLE feature a motion detector, light sensor, temperature sensor and a Bluetooth Low Energy transceiver that enable the wireless control of comfort settings in building spaces. Occupants need to feel comfortable as well as safe in the environment and providing them with control over the space is important. With the latest generation of wall sensors and thermostats you no longer need to touch the equipment on the wall to personalise occupant comfort. For example, the Allure UNITOUCH, high-resolution capacitive touchscreen is easy to view and simple to use, allowing for the control of a wide range of HVAC, lighting, and sunblind applications using a single device. This communicating sensor allows for the wireless control of comfort from a mobile phone by using Bluetooth® low energy technology. To ensure social distancing, people counting sensors can be a good tool to employ. In the context of a smooth return to commercial buildings, the data collected by this type of sensor (number of people per zone) can be used to ensure that the density of people per area is within social distancing guidelines. How can we try to provide access to buildings to healthy persons only? Providing an oximeter at the entrance to the building and encouraging occupants to test their blood oxygen levels may be a good, inexpensive way to prevent asymptomatic patients from entering a building. Another technique deals with infrared cameras, generally placed at the entrance of buildings, allow the detection of feverish people. We also need to easily identify people who have COVID. As soon as the infected person becomes aware of it, it would be advisable to warn people who have been in contact with
the infected person in the last 15 days. These individuals could then be asked to go and get tested in turn, and to quarantine themselves in order to prevent the spread of the virus. This is now possible, thanks to the infrastructure used for the indoor positioning platforms. Data can be saved, temporarily and securely, to allow occupants to be notified if necessary. It’s important to be open with employees and this can be delivered by providing a mix of information in an easy-to- read dashboard, available at the entrance to the building or directly from the building occupant’s phone. The dashboard could include the procedures that are put in place on the premises, for example disinfection routine and social distancing rules, or a simplified view of the status of the BMS with information such as showing the ventilation is working optimally. A digitalised floorplan could be utilised and enhanced with a new type of point of interest (POI) to make them interactive and allow people, in real time, to visualise the information specific to safe movement and occupancy of the premises.
The key is to bring as much of the building data together, in one place, as possible. This is where open protocols combined with APIs, such as RESTful API, can be vital. With RESTful API and the open Internet Protocol (IP), communication between devices becomes easier and you can achieve a fully integrated system. By using a RESTful API interface systems integrators can enable IT web services to easily interact with software applications.
Each building is unique, and each
organisation occupying all or part of a built space has specific needs. Whatever the constraints, a smooth return to public buildings will require adjustments in intelligent building systems; from a simple increase in the air refresh rate, to the application of all or part of the various measures we have just reviewed.
Read the latest at:
www.bsee.co.uk
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