‘Too cold’ & ‘too hot’ most common complaints

The International Facility Management Association has released “Temperature Wars: Savings vs. Comfort,” a new study that takes an indepth look at the most common thermal complaints made by workers and the variety of ways facility professionals respond to them.

For many years, IFMA has surveyed facility professionals to learn the top office complaints among employees. Respondents consistently cite the temperature being too hot or too cold as the most frequent grievances they hear — surpassing high noise levels, limited space and unpleasant odors.

Recent IFMA research also shows that many facility professionals are adjusting the thermostat to higher settings in the summer and lower settings in the winter in an effort to cut energy consumption and costs. This 2009 study identifies when most thermal complaints occur, the nature of the complaints, and the actions taken to make workers more comfortable and able to concentrate on their jobs.

Not surprisingly, survey respondents again report that the most common heating, ventilating and air conditioning complaints they receive are that the temperature is too cold (94 percent) or too hot (91 percent). Indoor air quality complaints are a distant third (25 percent), followed by too drafty (21 percent) and too noisy (16 percent).

Building occupants adjust to thermal comfort issues in different ways, the most common of which are through the use of personal fans (66 percent) or by a change in clothing (64 percent). Also popular with workers — though not with building management — is the use of personal heaters, which 60 percent of facility professionals report seeing. Many survey respondents say that personal heaters are not allowed, however, because they present a fire hazard. Other responses include using stand alone air conditioning units, blankets and even small wading pools under the desk.

“We have people with lap blankets and fingerless gloves on,” said one respondent. “Sad, isn’t it?”

When it comes to addressing occupants’ thermal complaints, 90 percent of facility professionals say they check the temperature in the area where the complaint was made to see if it is within standards; 87 percent validate that the HVAC system is working properly; and 75 percent adjust thermostats to provide for greater worker comfort.

Less popular responses include encouraging the occupant to wear layered clothing (35 percent) and temporarily moving the worker to another area (4 percent). Others report taking a vote of all occupants in a given control zone; asking people for a budget code to charge them for additional costs associated with running units more than agreed upon parameters; or simply doing nothing.

“We sometimes say we’ll make an adjustment, but don’t,” said one respondent. “This actually seems to work.”

“Usually, a prompt response saying that we are handling it is key,” said another. “Then, we follow up in a couple of hours to find out if the ‘adjustments’ made an improvement. Often, we haven’t actually physically done anything to change the temperature.”

During the summer months, survey respondents say they hear complaints that the temperature is both too hot (66 percent) and too cold (58 percent). However, 57 percent of facility professionals say their company does not relax the dress code during the summer to improve occupant comfort, whereas 43 percent say their company does. Summer “precooling,” a practice in which cool outdoor air is brought into a building at night, was reported by 47 percent of survey respondents.

The majority of those surveyed say temperatures at their facility are centrally controlled and cannot be regulated by individual occupants (56 percent). Forty two percent say that temperatures in their buildings are zone controlled, allowing facility managers and sometimes occupants to adjust the thermostat, and 2 percent report buildings that feature individual occupant or work station temperature control.

Energy efficiency is of prime importance to facility professionals, with the vast majority of respondents saying they utilize a number of energy saving techniques. Seventy seven percent say that they have updated or replaced an HVAC system or components; 73 percent have verified that their building automation system is working as designed; and 52 percent have installed more efficient light fixtures to reflect less heat. Common responses also include modifying ductwork (27 percent), installing new window shades (24 percent) and adding window film to improve thermal properties (24 percent).

The survey was drafted with the assistance of several HVAC experts and taken during June and July 2009. It is based on the responses of 473 IFMA members, with a margin of error of approximately +/- 5 percent.

IFMA is the world’s largest and most widely recognized international association for professional facility managers, supporting more than 19,500 members in 60 countries. The association’s members, represented in 125 chapters and 16 councils worldwide, manage more than 37 billion square feet of property and annually purchase more than US$100 billion in products and services. Formed in 1980, IFMA certifies facility managers, conducts research, provides educational programs, recognizes facility management certificate programs and produces World Workplace, the world’s largest facility management conference and exposition. To join and follow IFMA’s social media outlets online, visit the association’s LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter pages. For more information, visit the IFMA press room or www.ifma.org.

Bio-degradable and recycled ID cards for eco conscious brands

A new range of environmentally conscious ID cards and accessories is now available from DED Limited. Including bio-degradable and recycled cards as well as lanyards produced from a renewable source, these products are ideal for ID and membership cards for companies with an eco conscious brand strategy or message, as well as events, festivals and conferences with an environmentally friendly theme.

The new bio-degradable cards are made from PVC resin which is treated to make the cards totally environmentally friendly. Under normal circumstances the cards perform exactly the same as standard plastic cards, but when introduced into a fertile environment the breakdown process begins, taking the card from a solid card to non toxic matter in just 1 – 5 years. The bio-degradable card surface is perfectly clean and scratch free, just like a normal PVC card.

Recycled cards from Zebra are made from 52% post industrial recycled PVC core, providing an environmentally conscious and responsible solution for all types of cards. The remaining 48% of the card consists of standard PVC core, overlay, coatings, inks, stamps and magnetic stripe. Offering the same functionality as the normal PVC cards from Zebra, the recycled alternatives reduce the amount of virgin petroleum based material necessary for manufacturing and offer a much ‘greener’ solution.

Environmentally friendly lanyards are produced from a high renewable source – bamboo. Complementing this range of environmentally friendly cards perfectly, they are 3/8 of an inch thick and available in black, green, natural, blue, purple and red. Offering an alternative to the standard lanyards available on the market today which are manufactured from petroleum based material – these come from a real sustainable source.

Echelon and ROMlight Smart Lighting System Reduces Energy Use by Over 60%

Echelon Corporation (NASDAQ: ELON) and ROMlight International, Inc. today announced the first installation in Canada of a high bay lighting system featuring LonWorks® control networking technology to provide smart, two-way communicating lights. The new solution installed at the Kelly Western Services Ltd. aircraft hangar in Winnipeg uses energy efficient, individually dimmable lights to cut energy use by over 60 percent, or over 250,000 kWh per year. Combined with rebate incentives provided by the local utility, Manitoba Hydro, the Kelly Western installation is expected to yield a return on investment of just nine months. Without the utility rebate, the payback time would be 14 months.

 High bay lighting systems are typically used in buildings featuring high ceilings such as warehouses, large retail stores, grocery stores, convention centers, factories, athletic facilities, auditoriums, and airport hangars.

 “We were very delighted with the results,” said Gordon Peters, president of Kelly Western Services. “Only after the light levels were confirmed by an independent consultant did we believe that the results were correct. With the LonWorks enabled solution from ROMlight and in conjunction with our utility’s rebates, we were able to exceed all of our payback models. We’re extremely pleased with the performance of the system.”

 Kelly Western replaced all of the 1,000 watt lamps in the hangar with ROMlight’s 575 watt digital ballast High Bay fixtures embedded with Echelon’s control networking technology, allowing them to be remotely dimmed during off peak hours, lowering energy use by over 60 percent without reducing the existing light levels. The system is monitored and managed with user-friendly software from Streetlight.Vision. ROMlight’s High Bay fixtures are approved by Manitoba Hydro’s rebate program, enabling Kelly Western to recover a substantial part of the capital costs for this project.

 Echelon’s ISO/IEC standards-based technology allows products from different manufacturers to work together on the same, open network. The technology is used in lighting solutions worldwide, from buildings to streetlights. More information is available at www.echelon.com.

ID card scheme is fundamentally flawed and should be shelved

TSSI Systems says it is not enough for the home secretary to only scrap plans to make ID cards compulsory, the whole scheme should go. “The scheme has been ill conceived from the start. Apart from the outrageous costs, people’s privacy is still at risk,” said John Barker, General Manager, TSSI Systems Ltd.

 “The scheme has already cost up to £200 million of tax payers money and is predicted to cost over £4.9 billion in the next 10 years, a preposterous amount of money in today’s trying times. But it is the security of personal data which should be the primary concern surrounding ID cards especially with frequent cases of government data loss, which is reason enough to abolish the entire scheme.”

 “The scheme may never have worked in the first place as the correct security measures were not in place. As biometrics alone is not enough, a strong verification technology needs to be applied. In order for an ID card scheme to work the data needs to be stored as an algorithmic encryption, this is impossible for even the most sophisticated fraudster to decipher,” continued Barker.

 “Secondly the storage of the information collected needs to be carefully structured; the biometric data must be stored separately from other personal data. This makes it much harder for anyone to obtain enough personal details to steal an identity or clone a card.”

 “Leaving the system open on a voluntary basis is laughable, who in their right mind would voluntarily hand over biometric information to a scheme that is fundamentally flawed? The scheme is currently available in Manchester but only 3,500 people have shown interest. If this is rolled out nationwide on a voluntary basis, it is doubtful this number will rise by much.

 “The Government needs to stop this hemorrhaging of tax payer’s money at the peril of their privacy and scrap the scheme in its entirety.”

Reflections on Record Breaking ConnectivityWeek

With nearly 1,000 people in attendance in Santa Clara this year, it was clearly a watershed event in many ways. The perfect storm produced a perfect event; a combination of rich subjects discussed, enormous business opportunities for vendors and integrators alike, on a backdrop of solving climate change problems and interestingly an awareness of social changes permeating our world. All of these came together in Santa Clara in June.

Beyond a vision

Since 2003, attendees of BuilConn have been chasing a vision, in the intersection of technology and automation with openness as a fundamental and key principle. It seems that the years have seen realizing that vision to be a challenge, many felt that while the “vision” was strong, the driver for business was weak; it has fundamentally not been bankable.

In 2009, that changed. The buzz and discussion was no longer about a vision, but about tangible issues. The presentations, from the 240 or so speakers, were about experiences, best practices, and discussions about what to do now, how to ensure we have the right technologies, products, services and ecosystems to bring value to building owners and society at large.

Energy, the driver

The appetite for energy solutions at ConnectivityWeek this year was clear. From discussions on the stimulus to the role of IT in the future of energy, energy was the substance of almost all of the conversations. This reminds me that Building Automation started off as fundamentally an energy management function and we are now just returning to those roots.

The difference is that now we’re talking about energy management in the bigger (and thus more valuable) context. Not just in-premise energy management, but integrating with externalities such as the supply side (utilities), with renewables, storage and with much more energy aware end-users and building occupiers. In the 70’s and 80’s energy management was just about saving money, an argument that soon vanished as energy costs came down. Now cost savings are only the beginning as people realize that everything from societal benefits to operational benefits and occupier and customer perception are driven by energy conservation, efficiencies and sustainability. They are all interlinked, inter connected!

IT as the enabler

It is no surprise that being held in the heart of Silicon Valley, ConnectivityWeek was very attractive to IT players. Looking at the speaker list you see multiple speakers from Microsoft, Google, Sun, NetApp, VMware, Cisco and many other big names, they are getting the energy bug and they come to ConnectivityWeek to understand how to apply their technologies, products and best practices in the future of energy.

Many people in Building Automation still don’t understand why IT players are interested in this space and why they should take note of this trend; this myopic view is unfortunate since it is the reality of the future of energy and buildings. Like the creation of the Internet, the birth of the Energy Internet (or whatever you want to call it) will connect all manner of real-time systems from building automation, the grid, smart homes, transportation and pretty much anything else that uses energy, which is pretty much everything!

Horizontal silos into horizontal enablers

For many, energy has been a vertical silo. The past has seen the generation of energy to distribution and use as being an integrated industry not linked to anything else. This applies to electricity and oil and gas alike. As Smart Grid takes hold and more of our energy consuming devices become electric (such as cars), combined with the birth of distributed generation and storage in large scale as well as in our homes, buildings and vehicles, electricity will touch and be integrated with more and more of our world, in the same way that telecommunication is now integrated into our lives.

At this point, energy is no longer a vertical, specialized sector, but a horizontal subject that will touch everything. The impact of this on Building Automation cannot be underestimated. There is a similarity to telecoms changing from a vertical monopoly to the horizontal subject that it is today. The same goes for news and information, and energy is next – the writing was on the wall at ConnectivityWeek.

The young and social media

One of the most fascinating parts of ConnectivityWeek was the entry of the young into the mix, as well as a discussion of the trends driving societal changes in the world, specifically the way social networking and the expectations of the future generation.

Bottom line is this; the future of energy and buildings has to be designed with full understanding of the future energy users and building occupiers and owners. Here we are talking about catering to the iPod generation, not the professionals of average age 50 that typify both the building automation and utility industries today.

The YoungEnergy Network spoke out loud and clear at ConnectivityWeek; they are ready to take on the challenge; to address the climate change issue and design the future energy systems. They are sharp, motivated and well organized. Ignore them at your peril!

Where to next?

As far as ConnectivityWeek, we are already starting to plan for 2010. The dates are set May 24-27, 2010 in Santa Clara and the growth we saw in 2009 is only the start of the growth of this space. We would welcome comments and suggestions; reach out to me at anto@clasma.com.

In the mean time, on the Smart Grid space, things are just starting to get really interesting. With the stimulus grants and projects about to be announced during the summer, the funding will start to flow into the Smart Grid and green building space. GridWeek 2009 in DC September 21-24 will be another watershed event on the policy front. Utilities, policy makers and those in the consumer side (buildings, homes and industrial) will benefit from taking notice and truly understand how the Smart Grid will impact their world, specially when the climate change bill will start to bite.

The world of interoperability standards will take a leap forward at Grid-Interop in November. In partnership with DOE’s GridWise Architecture Council and NIST, this event in its third year, will bring together developers of standards across all disciplines from Smart Grid through to building automation, homes, vehicles, and all other interconnected areas. They will come together to figure out how the systems interoperate, at Grid-Interop in Denver, November 17-19.

Network access control now addresses multiple needs

CIOs and chief information security officers whose network managers are evaluating network access control (NAC) products are advised to lay down some guidelines for finding the right solution. NAC now has several uses and as many potential pitfalls. An organization should define its primary usage case for NAC, map out a plan for taking advantage of NAC’s other uses and decide on an enforcement protocol. Otherwise, it risks choosing the wrong vendor or product.

Some CIOs and their staffs may have soured on NAC after it was overhyped in 2005. Many IT departments learned the hard way that NAC was difficult to deploy, a drag on the network and users, and of limited benefit for managed devices. Useful no doubt on a college campus, with its annual onslaught of users bearing personal laptops, NAC was less compelling for your average, buttoned-down big company. Vendors delayed NAC plans, shifted gears, closed up shop or got gobbled up.

But network access control technology has undergone a personality change since its splashy debut some six years ago. Then, worms were the latest plague and NAC products part of the solution. Today’s NAC is all about the user, according to Gartner Inc. analyst Lawrence Orans — in particular, corralling the ever-increasing population of outsiders who need access to corporate networks. In addition, companies must contend with employees using personal devices. Bring Your Own Computer has spread from the academy to the corporate world.

“Network managers are very interested in establishing policies that control access to the network,” Orans said. “I speak to hundreds of network managers a year, and there is not one that says I don’t want more control over which devices or endpoints access the network. NAC is still very much alive.”

The four main use cases for network access control

Gartner has identified four common usage cases, and a recent survey shows their popularity among NAC users:

Guest networking, 79%
Endpoint baselining, 15%
Identity-aware networking, 5%
Monitoring and containment, 1%

By far, the most common initial reason for deploying NAC products today is guest networking, mostly to give guests Internet access only. That’s often on a wireless network in common areas. Endpoint baselining is the pre-connect diagnostic that checks whether the device has the patches, antivirus software, personal firewall and other custom checks prescribed by corporate policy.

“Make sure you have a path when you start NAC. Not only think about the first thing you want to accomplish, but ultimately how you would map it out to get to all four usage cases,” Orans said.

This is important because some deployments will not easily allow you to add more NAC features. For example, many NAC users ask whether they can build their guest network using a MAC address as the authentication criteria, Orans said, referring to a computer’s unique hardware number.

“It’s a great solution for guest networking: If your MAC address is not in the database then you’re not getting on the guest network,” he said. “But the point is, you really can’t build upon that MAC address for endpoint baselining,” where a NAC agent comes into play.

The government and military, as well as financial services, tend to be especially interested in visibility into their networks and using NAC for identity-aware purposes, Orans said. Universities, the most aggressive users of NAC in both wired and wireless networks as several SearchCIO.com case studies detail, also employ this NAC function, as well as baseline checks and quarantining.

Vendors that have strong solutions for endpoint baselining, for example, are typically not the best choice for identity-aware networking (and vice versa), Orans said. A focused approach is to decide first on your primary NAC usage case, and then build a shortlist of vendors that can best satisfy that usage case.

He recommends building a chart with the usage cases across the top and ranking the criteria for each use case as a high, medium or low priority. For example, user and device authentication are critical for companies primarily interested in using NAC products for endpoint baselining; not so much for companies using them for identity awareness.

Defining the usage case and matching that to the right vendor was critical for Wesley Ward, an IT security engineer at American Systems Corp., among the largest employee-owned companies in the U.S. with 1,500 employees and 16 office locations. The Chantilly, Va.-based company provides systems engineering to government and private customers, including the General Services Administration, Internal Revenue Service, branches of the U.S. military and the Department of Homeland Security. Current projects include the massive national security directive mandating that many U.S. agencies leverage common IT terminology and data standards to ensure compatibility to collect biometric information.

Guest networking was the primary concern, and monitoring devices after they connect to the network was the second driver, Ward said. “We wanted to give business partners and guests controlled access to different facets of the network and only give them access to certain resources,” he said.

The company looked at technologies that would plug into its existing structure; tell them what was on the network, who was authenticated to its Active Directory and who was unmanaged; and segregate those unmanaged clients from controlled and sensitive information. For some of its federal clients coming onto the network, American Systems could not install any software on their machines, so it needed a solution that was clientless and would still allow the company to interrogate the device, regardless of whether it had rights over it.

The criteria ruled out several vendors, including market leader Cisco Systems Inc., and led the company to ForeScout Technologies Inc. The Cupertino, Calif.-based vendor offered a device that was agentless but also allowed American to install a Secure Sockets Layer applet to interrogate and quarantine noncompliant devices, before and after connection to the network.

“We got the best of both worlds,” Ward said.

IT managers involved in decision to purchase IP-based physical security products

According to a new report from IMS Research, IT managers are involved in almost 60% of decisions to purchase IP-based physical security products. The report, based on a survey of North American integrators and installers of IP-based security products, also found that over three quarters of the companies surveyed dealt with IT managers more now than they did one year ago.

Market Analyst at IMS Research, Niall Jenkins commented, “IT managers are increasingly getting involved in making and influencing the decision to buy IP-based security products. These products often use existing networks and IT managers are working much closer with security managers to facilitate this integration”.

Another key finding from the research was that almost 60% of the systems installers surveyed thought that vendors do not provide adequate support for their IP-based security products. Over 40% of systems integrators also agreed that vendors were not meeting their needs. Top of the list of requested support was additional training, demonstration materials, telephone and web-based support and better software and SDKs.

IMS Research’s report, “IP Trends in Security: A Survey of Systems Integrators and Installers – 2009 Edition”, is published in two regional volumes, Europe and North America.

Making Building Automation Brainier

Scientific Conservation says its software can boost the energy savings of a typical building automation system by 25 percent. Making buildings more energy efficient is a focus for many,including Energy Secretary Steven Chu.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu calls it the “Goldilocks problem” of building automation systems – buildings can be too hot, or they can be too cold, but very rarely are they just right. Scientific Conservation Inc. says it can fix the problem. Formed by veterans in the business of automating HVAC, lighting and other building systems to save energy, the Berkeley, Calif.-based startup makes software that picks up the efficiency slack in those systems – a process known as “automatic continuous commissioning.”

The idea is to combat the “energy drift” that occurs in building automation systems by constantly sensing where they’re wasting energy and adjusting accordingly, said Andrew Colman, SCI’s chief technology officer. (The company is pronounced “sky,” by the way.)

“If you have a building that’s perfectly tuned up with a brand new building automation system, and then you leave it alone and people go about doing what they do – tweaking thermostats, leaving things on, adjusting things – the building is going to drift downward in its energy efficiency to the tune of about 17 percent over one or two years,” he explained. Clogged filters, off-kilter temperature sensors and a host of other problems add to the drift, he said.

That ends up wasting money on unnecessary energy bills, as well as shortening the lifespan of HVAC systems by commanding that they do things like run hot and cold simultaneously, he said. Fixing that is called “re-commissioning,” and nowadays it’s mostly done manually, with engineers walking through the buildings to check systems and make adjustments, he said. LEED certification as well as common sense emands it be done every few years, and it’s a lucrative after-market for the companies that install the systems – about $4.5 billion in the United States, Colman estimated.

SCI is offering its subscription-based software as a service to do the same job. The software can detect where energy is being wasted, determine the cause of the problem, notify the person in charge and generate work orders for fixes, Colman said.

Others in the field build similar software, including Prenova and Enforma, both of which have former employees now at SCI. Cimetrics and Tririga have software to manage commercial or retail real estate energy use, and demand response providers like EnerNoc and Comverge liketo integrate with building utomation systems where they can.

In fact, managing building energy use is an increasingly competitive space. Incumbent market leaders are fighting it out with startups, as well as big new entrants like Cisco Systems, that promise better ways to do it (see Cisco Jumps Into Energy Management for Computers, Buildings and Green Light post).

Colman claims that SCI’s software allows for a far more hands-off and nimble detection and correction xperience. A typical 100,000-square-foot office can save about $30,000 a year on a $15,000 software installation fee and $9,000-per-year subscription, he said.

Clients such as Neiman Marcus, Hardee’s, Santa Clara County and NASA have seen real-world results that can yield payback in as little as six months, he said. SCI’s software is compatible with building automation systems by the heavyweights in the field, ncluding Honeywell, Johnson Controls, Siemens, Schneider Electric, Eaton, General Electric and Echelon, giving it “automatic plug-in” capability with about 70 percent of the systems out there, he estimated.

SCI has been funded by friends and family to date, and is seeking to raise several million dollars in a series A round, Colman said. That should push the company into profitability, he said. SCI also plans to release a “Platinum”-level service that integrates building automation control systems in the coming months, he said.
“The real heart of Platinum is a self-healing building,” he said.

While that will require customers to agree to an “outside-of-the-firewall” system controlling their buildings, Colman feels most customers are ready to make that leap.

Buildings consume about 39 percent of the energy produced in the United States. As head of the Department of Energy, Chu has made building efficiency a priority for the billions of dollars it plans to invest into both old-fashioned fixes like weatherization and research into what he calls “transformational energy technologies” (see Green Light post).

The Nobel Prize-winning physicist made the point last week at the Edison Electric Institute’s annual convention in San Francisco. In a speech covering DOE’s energy goals, Chu highlighted advances in building automation software as an area ripe for innovation, recalling how he used to have to reprogram the building automation systems in the labs he worked in to ensure a consistent temperature for proper experiments.

In a press conference after his Thursday speech, Chu floated the idea of the DOE putting research dollars into developing “open source” models for next-generation building control software.

That kind of development model could be a basis for U.S.-Chinese collaboration into new energy efficiency research, he added, since it would avoid some of the thornier problems of fighting over the intellectual property rights of the results.

China will be a critical market for building efficiency, since it’s set to build 300 billion square feet of new buildings by 2020, the equivalent of the United State’s current real estate stock (see Green Building Entrepreneur: Build Green or Face Catastrophe).

Beyond new technology, there are economic barriers to cross in the building energy efficiency battle, Chu noted. One is finding a way to bridge the tenant-landlord gap. If tenants pay the power bills, they probably don’t want to spend money on upgrading a building they might not be in for long enough to pay back the investment.

On the other hand, “If the landlord pays the energy bill, the tenant will most likely run the air conditioner and leave the winds open,” he said. “You have to align the incentives.”

Given that energy efficiency offers faster paybacks than any other clean energy investment, entrepreneurs are busy testing ways to bridge the traditional gaps that have forestalled more investment in it (see A PPA Model For Building Energy Efficiency?).