Enviro Building Services has recently undertaken a project to help council facility managers at a NSW council remotely access their building portfolio data using the Niagara N4 application.
“Enviro Building Services has helped us connect many of our properties to a Niagara BMS over the last 8 months to enable remote visualisation of our distributed assets. Adding this screen to the office has made managing our portfolio much more user friendly & interactive. Our team can navigate through to each site and remotely understand what is happening, improving operational efficiency.”
– Coordinator of Property & Assets
- Many distributed assets and buildings spread across a relatively large area
- Multiple versions of Tridium Niagara were currently in use across the portfolio, from 3.4 to 3.8 AX
- Multiple versions of Innotech hardware in use
- Various series of Jaces were connected to both AX and N4 servers
- Limited remote visibility of building environments and assets
- High maintenance & servicing costs as a result of supporting different versions of niagara, different vendor hardware and different server applications AX and N4
Enviro’s investigation and solutions began to be implemented in January 2019 with 5 buildings as part of the scope. A plan was created to connect council buildings to one remotely accessible N4 dashboard, to enable remote monitoring, control and alerting. Council connected buildings included two small to medium commercial buildings, an aquatic centre, civic centre and a library.
The Solution:
- Niagara AX field devices were upgraded to N4 devices
- Existing AX servers were consolidated and moved into one N4 server. This enabled:
- System trending and alarming for faults
- Standardisation of graphics and page templates
- Integration of third party systems/ applications
- Identification and focus on critical systems like server rooms
- One management point for the entire portfolio
Over the last 8 months, additions include:
- An additional 5 buildings have been added to the solution
- Enhanced access and email alarms for critical spaces e.g. server rooms
- Time schedules implemented for less utilised spaces such as meeting rooms. This helped to reduce run hours of assets
- Live monitoring of Cooling tower automatic dosing
- Installation and setup of a weather station to allow for dew point monitoring, which assists with Aquatic centre condensation management
- Water meter monitoring has been introduced for a cooling tower. This helps identify possible wastage and usage spikes, compared to the previous application which provided only total facility water consumption
- Fire trip monitoring alarm when building Fire systems go into Evacuation mode.
- Installation of a 55 inch Technology Core touch screen for council managers to view assets and buildings. This has helped improve operational efficiency when managing different sites
- One system to manage the whole portfolio
- Remote visualisation, control & diagnostics of issues in buildings
- Reduced servicing costs for multiple BMS solutions, as well as reduced servicing costs for buildings through better remote diagnosis and quick visibility
- Improved operational efficiency among the facility management team
admin@enviroservices.com.au
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