Facilities Reducing Utility Costs with Building Management Systems

Posted

Village Worker, a firm specializing in efficient building management, is helping commercial customers reduce utility costs through Barix IP control and automation systems.

Village Worker customizes building management systems for each end user, employing automatic, real-time networked solutions to eliminate inefficient, manual environmental monitoring processes.

Using Barix Barionet IP products, Village Worker builds end-to-end control and automation architectures that trigger actions based on data readings from a variety of connected devices. Specifically, Village Worker uses the Barionet’s ability to network a wide range of sensors to monitor temperatures, water usage and occupancy, helping end users make money-saving decisions.

Village Worker relies on the Barionet’s BCL programming language from Barix for flexibility, providing the freedom to design building management systems that suit each environment. For example, Village Worker often integrates Barionet with water flow meters to monitor usage with every pulse, helping businesses and understand how they can reduce waste and save money.

On the commercial side, Village Worker often customizes pool instrumentation solutions for hotels and resorts, integrating the Barionet with Dectron Dry-O-Tron pool systems to monitor water and air temperature, water flow, power fluctuations, compressor pressure and alarm contacts.

Village Worker president Lali Singh says the Barionet has been as useful for solving problems at the commissioning stage as it is for ongoing reliability across alarming, trending and data collection and charting.

“We recently used the Barionet at a resort in Santa Fe to install temperature sensors at the incoming and outgoing water flow points of a large swimming pool, for the purpose of understanding the efficiency of Airtherm fan coils based as temperatures rise,” Singh says. “We found that the plumbing was reversed at the water flow points, making the temperature on the output lower than the incoming water temperature. Having the Barionet to collect data and diagnose that problem during commissioning saved years of troubleshooting around why a certain zone wasn’t cooling. The client was very pleased as it saved the business a lot of time, money and headaches.”

In another recent project at the same Santa Fe resort, Village Worker used the Barionet to collect data and chart progress to support a large Airtherm geothermal system. The solution uses 12 Barionet devices to monitor hot and cold water coming from the main heat exchanger for circulation through the building. The Barionets communicate with all connected thermostats over IP, controlling fans and calling back to the main Airtherm system to open and close zones based on setpoints.

Earlier this month UtiliSave, a forensic utility bill auditing company, said it helped a New York hospital received a nearly $700,000 water bill credit.

 

Environment + Energy Leader