Building Management Systems have been around since the construction of commercial and industrial buildings. The term BMS was only introduced in the early 70’s because of the complex electronic devices that were now being integrated into an organisation, allowing building administrators to monitor and control the building from a remote location or from an onsite control room.
There are three functions that Sitronix focuses on when integrating a Building Management System; Controlling, Monitoring and Optimising. These three functions work synergistically to create comfort, safety and efficiency with a reduction of energy consumption. Thereby drastically reducing the running and maintenance costs of the building.
Building Management Systems comprise of Electric Power Systems, HVAC (Heating, Ventilation and Air conditioning) System, Security and Surveillance, access control, Plumbing system, Fire alarms, lifts and illumination systems. These are all major roll players in the control of comfort conditions, individual room control and staff productivity.
Return on Investment with Building Management Systems
Before the proposed ESKOM increase, the financial benefits of implementing a full scale Building Management System was that the break-even point was typically 3 to 7 years depending on new or retrofitted BMS deployments. With our advancement in technology, the payback on the same buildings is visible by well under 18 months.
BMS a division of Sandbox Holdings, was formed in March 2009, with the intention of researching and developing its own energy standards template and measurement methodology to assist building owners and administrators of various synergistic solutions to benchmark their own energy consumption to comparative buildings on a best practice basis.
The ROI will then provide a reasonably quick turnaround in terms of providing the estimated costs of implementing a BMS system and the estimated savings that would result. As an example of their findings the following graph shows the estimated KWH usage for certain buildings within a number of factors such as certain Geographic Zone, occupancy construction type, direction, number of floors etc.
Taking an office paying bills at 35c per KHW before the Eskom price hike – the following graph shows what the annual electricity bills are likely to be over the next 5 years. It is assumed the BMS system is retrofitted and shows a 30% savings. However often we are finding buildings are anything up to 5 times more energy inefficient relative to the benchmark; the 30% savings assume the building is already efficient but not BMS automated
BMS have been able to demonstrate that by managing the energy usage to a targeted benchmark with a 30% plus saving that we are able to create a safety net for future impactful electrical increases.
We are able to integrate systems from multiple suppliers and use modern technology in the PRI and video camera processing capability. Video technology and image processing has taken huge strides in recent years – and using this technology has inevitably reduced the cost of implementation, increased the speed of deployment and increased the accuracy dramatically.
The diagram below shows how a BMS system will manage lighting, air conditioning, water conditioning and plug leakage. The measurement of the motion and temperature profile of a work environment may be monitored by video technology and processed for input to a BMS system. The additional benefit of this technology being its ability to process for additional factors such as smoke detection, especially in work environments with exceptionally high roof volumes found in New Style Malls.
