IoT Powered Building Management System for Small and Medium Sized Buildings

Building Management Systems (BMS) have been used to automate equipment in large buildings for almost 3 decades, but such systems are not suitable for small and medium sized buildings (of less than 100K sq. ft.). This problem is compounded by the fact that customer’s multiple locations are dispersed across the geography, making it difficult to drive consistent manual behaviour, resulting in challenges such as high energy costs, compliance issues, and asset breakdown.

IoT powered building management system for small and medium sized buildings helps in optimizing energy consumption, maintaining temperature compliances, managing asset health and facilitating digital workflows. It works across protocols and equipment of multiple OEMs. The technology is wireless, plug & play enabling easy deployments and maintenance. Being a hardware light solution, it is cost-effective and delivers a faster return on investment.

IoT Technology that fulfills SMB needs

It’s not easy for small and medium-sized buildings (SMB) to invest a massive sum of money to ensure efficient operations. The Internet of Things (IoT) is a powerful technology that focuses on in-house innovations across edge devices & their networking, cloud platforms, and end-user interfaces. Ensuring building productivity, optimal energy consumption, and automation at reduced cost becomes possible with this smart technology.

The Internet of Things (IoT) comes with:

Wireless Mesh for Sensing and Control

An open-source wireless mesh OpenThread (from Google) develops a mesh-based robust solution that includes a wide variety of battery-powered sensors such as temperature, humidity, luminosity, CO2, etc. It relays data to a gateway using multiple hops on the mesh network.

The whole network is resilient to faults and opens up a broad variety of applications ranging from deploying a large number of sensors inside/outside buildings within a campus to connected street lighting solutions spread across a large municipality.

Industrial Grade Gateway

IoT often comes in a state-of-the-art gateway that is an open platform based on Raspberry Pi Compute Module (contains a 32-bit Quad-core processor, 1GB RAM, and onboard disk, and operates on a Linux-based Operating system). It supports a wide variety of connectivity options through the plug & play modules such as 4G through an mPCIE card, WiFi/Bluetooth/OpenThread through an M.2 card, and onboard LAN.

The IoT gateway supports multiple features for rugged operation in difficult environments in small and medium-sized buildings, including dual SIM connectivity, battery-backed RTC, onboard watchdog, battery backup, and isolated RS485 connectivity.

IoT Stack on Cloud

Cloud-connected IoT stack developed using open-source technologies delivers standard services such as alerts, time series databases, reports, and dashboards.

This integrated analytical platform provides scalability to small and medium-sized buildings. The configurable dashboard platform allows facility managers to customize different user interfaces across and within the customer through drag-and-drop elements without writing a single line of code.

Choosing a cloud-based IoT stack means managing more than 200 Mn data points every single day that can scale up to 100X very easily.

Plug & Play Platform

Typical deployment timelines in buildings and chains are a bit long (actually depends on the sq. ft area). On-site hardware systems consisting of the industrial-grade gateway and sensing/control endpoints on the multi-hope, wireless mesh enable faster deployment, bringing down the timeline of legacy hardware by 50-80%.

This plug-and-play platform enables remote deployment, troubleshooting, and maintenance of the edge hardware.

Is a small size building actually worth a BMS?

Well, the honest answer is “no.” Building management systems haven’t been designed for small buildings. The ideal solution is the implementation of IoT BMS, which is cost effective and ROI based solution.