As #smartbuilding buzzwords go, Monitoring-Based Commissioning or “MBCx” has a more robust history than some. As a concept, MBCx or Constant-Commissioning has been around for more than 2 decades, with its origins in the research work conducted at Texas A&M University and at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab as far as back as the 1990s. The first commercial implementations of MBCx started more than a decade ago. Since MBCx is a not a buzzword du jour, what explains the reason why ACE IoT has seen a rather dramatic increase in the number of customers and potential customers exploring MBCx?
It’s no secret that buildings account for a significant portion of global carbon emissions every year – the built environment currently contributes about 40 percent of all CO2 released into the atmosphere every year. And with 111 million existing buildings in the U.S. today (only a handful of which have may have the infrastructure or technology necessary to achieve effective decarbonization), the need for retrofitting at scale becomes paramount. That translates into roughly 10,000 buildings a day – all of which need to become optimized in order to meet these 2050 goals. Manually tuning and adjusting one room at a time within these buildings just won’t cut it.
Harvesting and analyzing building data has become an essential task for those who work with building owners seeking to improve energy efficiency, reduce operational costs, and meet sustainability goals. At ACE IoT Solutions, we often refer to ourselves as “data plumbers” for such buildings. Indeed, at the upcoming CxEnergy conference in Dallas, we will give away mini plungers to underscore the “we get the data flowing” role that we can play for building optimization specialists, sustainability advisors, building commissioning agents, CEMs, and other consultants to building owners.
OK, a cute moniker, you might say, but what does being a data plumber really mean? Certainly, it’s someone who can navigate the complex landscape of building automation systems (BAS), OT networks, independent data layers (IDLs), and data analytics tools. But let’s go further in depth. To us, there are four key steps or responsibilities of data plumbers for buildings.