Wireless technology drives the mobile devices people use every day, such as phones, tablets, laptops, GPS, and more. Wireless technology can also enable better performance and energy savings for commercial buildings.
What does wireless tech have to do with energy?
Research by ENERGY STAR indicates that commercial office buildings waste as much as 30% of their energy consumption in managing lighting, HVAC and humidity control. A building management system (BMS) can help control energy use; in fact, new construction generally incorporates a system (and wiring) in its design plan. However, existing buildings and smaller enterprises sometimes struggle to justify investing in a BMS, in part because retrofit wiring installation can be cost-prohibitive and disruptive.
In addition, some facilities have physical limitations for which wireless is the only logical solution, such as heritage buildings, glass meeting rooms, or adjacent buildings where a wired installation would be impractical.
Deploying a wireless BMS solution offers advantages for facility and energy management:
- Ease of installation is a given – no special wiring, no renovation, and minimal disruption to business. A wireless BMS installation is faster and less costly, which leads to lower cost of ownership and faster ROI.
- Wireless offers full scalability due to open protocols for communication and applications, making it simple to begin with a single zone and then expand. Upgrades and add-ons are also easier to manage.
- In support of green initiatives, wireless adheres to regulations and guidelines – and enables the use of energy-efficient systems.
Not yesterday’s wireless
Although wireless was once considered unreliable for building applications, the technology has overcome earlier problems with interference and signal reach. Wireless building systems are also secure and can use commercial, governmental, and military grade encryption with multilevel authentication.
The wireless standards used in the majority of commercial buildings worldwide are EnOcean® and ZigBee®. These standards support devices that perform the same function types, but they differ in networking and communication protocols.
- Understand the business needs, goals and budget before evaluating wireless and wired choices.
- Work with providers that offer a wide range of product and technology choices.
- Insist upon distributed intelligence in building control products to improve network performance and reliability.
- Factor the regional frequency range limits into system design.
- Use open-standard protocols to enable cross-vendor interoperability and avoid being locked into a single vendor.