Business | Purrmetrix

One of our radiators is missing…

7 February 2017 by Hermionec

How often do facilities managers lose bits of their building?

More often than you might think.

The curious case of the missing radiator

Took a call from a client earlier in the year, who had a customer running a large educational estate. Many blocks of buildings, dating back to the Victorian era, most serviced from a central boiler room and a number of heating circuits. The problem, simply put, is that no one really knows which radiators belong to which circuit.

Over the years new legs have been added, some bits bypassed, whole blocks rationalised and generally, the records of what has been done aren’t complete. Now the customer wants to improve hot water circulation with new pumps on the circuits and not being sure how much capacity each circuit needs creates a problem.

Letting the data speak for itself

This is where live data comes into its own – there’s something very pleasing about putting sensors on each of these radiators and watching the radiators on plan light up as each circuit is tested. It’s certainly lower hassle than trying to do the same with data loggers and offers the added bonus of being able to identify the delay between boiler supplying hot water and it being available in the radiators.

But look closer – this is problem not confined to rambling Victorian establishments and ‘losing’ bits of a heating system. In fact it’s common to any control system that is trying to deal with shifting agendas over the years. You see it often in a BMS, where layers of different controls are added to cater for long gone meeting rooms or zones that don’t reflect the current layout. Without regular audits and monitoring, performance drift in buildings can chisel away at any gains made through investments in new energy efficient capital equipment.

Fighting back against performance drift

The first step in dealing with drift is making a regular audit part of your maintenance regime. There’s plenty of evidence that ‘retro-commissioning’ heating/cooling systems can provide an energy reduction payback in less than a year, even before the improvements in performance when combined with more efficient capital equipment.

If a full blown retro-commissioning audit is outside your resources, at least making room for regular monitoring of the basics such as run time, set point, occupier overrides, start-stop times can keep your building on track.

Before you get to the stage of losing your radiators.

If you would like to know more about how Purrmetrix analysis can help you avoid performance drift and keep your HVAC on track, contact us now.

Fixing Social Housing with Technology – how hard can it be?

29 January 2017 by Hermionec

10 million people. That’s how many of us live in social housing in the UK: nearly 20% of our housing stock is owned by social landlords. With nearly 4 million homes to operate, they face a formidable maintenance task and, in the main, they’re trying to do it with out of date tools – housing management systems straight out of the 1990s, multiple incompatible processes and a mass of silo’d data.

We know how to use technology – but does our landlord?

So in a world where us civilians are coming to terms with Smart Homes, even if we don’t have a clear business case, why aren’t social landlords engaging with technology? It has the potential to massively increase the efficiency of their business or even completely restructure the way housing is delivered. Imagine a housing provider who provides a platform for tenants to self manage their own properties – or a housing provider who rolls provision of all utilities and social care into the rent.

More practically, using the right analytics, imagine a housing provider who can identify and diagnose problems with a building’s fabric or systems remotely and ensure the right team, with the right tools, are deployed to provide the right solutions. Or using the same data to single out the homes that are eligible for funding for improvements.

This is a future that HACT – the Housing Association Charitable Trust – wants to create. Faced with substantial challenges over the next five years – cuts in benefits budget, the escalating price of housing – HACT knows the social housing sector needs to embrace innovation to survive so they have been digging into the barriers and challenges that are slowing progress. Their new manifesto (Is Housing Really Ready to Go Digital), identifies three barriers to change and what can be done about them:

– Little visible leadership and accountability for technology at board level. Consequently tech is generally treated as a cost item, rather than an opportunity for fundamental change. Worse, where technology projects are commissioned, there is little embedded expertise in what can be delivered or how to measure accountability.

– As a result, an over-reliance on consultant-led change. Without clear leadership on the potential of technology, consulting projects tend to focus on rationalising existing systems.

– Low understanding of the potential value of data. Although housing has a huge amount of data it is too poorly structured and tools for effective analysis are generally lacking.

HACT’s manifesto has practical suggestions for how to deal with these problems – starting with a programme to match UK digital leaders with housing provider boards, and supporting their involvement in the business transformations that can result.

For those of us living and breathing tech every day, it’s easy to underestimate the challenges involved in promoting tech initiatives in sectors like housing. Bridging the ‘Digital Governance Gap’ in housing is not only challenging, it could be transformative for millions of people. If you want to know more about how to get involved, check out HACT’s Digital page.

Finding your buildings’ data

15 November 2016 by Hermionec

Many organisations see the value in using data to optimise their property performance – reduced energy costs, deferred maintenance spends, improved space utilisation and staff productivity.

But the work needed to make this happen should not be underestimated. We are currently running a short email series on the basics of building analytics (sign up below) and one of the simplest but most daunting steps is often finding the relevant data and auditing it for quality.

Hence we have produced this short checklist of some of the commonest forms of data relevant to building analytics, and where you might find it.

DOWNLOAD YOUR CHECKLIST HERE.

Interested in reading the whole series, including how to use data, awkward questions for analytics platforms and building the business case?

The business case for building analytics – some case studies

13 November 2016 by Hermionec

Buildings offer a wealth of data about their performance. Getting information from building data isn’t easy – Pike Research estimate that 80% of FMs only use 20% of the data available in their BMS.

A lack of time and training is certainly one barrier. Another may be that it is difficult to build the business case for the work needed to collect and make sense of all this data. To help with this, we’re assembling a list of good examples of building data analysis for a range of goals. These examples come from vendors of a variety of solutions all over the industry.

Next time you want to have a conversation with your FD about investing in data tools, hopefully this will give you some benchmarks.

Carbon Credentials: optimising BMS controls for VUS Hotels. Forecast to save £20,000 pa in first phase.

A study from University of California of four enterprises and university campuses focussing on attained savings

IES: a project for Glasgow City Council using BMS and metering data that highlighted annual savings of £85,000. A more detailed write up is also available here.

Demand Logic: Potential savings of £390,000 for Kings College

Concept Energy Data: Real time data reduces energy by 7% in four schools

Optimised Buildings: A <6 month ROI from energy savings identified in a Financial Services HQ.

Got a pet project that should be mentioned here? Get in touch! As long as it involves using building data (and ideally has some quantifiable results) we’ll add it to the list.

Baking with your own data – Import views

31 October 2016 by Hermionec

If you’re analysing the performance of your building and its HVAC systems you probably already have data from other sources – meter data, building management system data, occupancy data, for example.

We at PurrTowers have been working for a while on ways to allow you to use other data alongside your kitten data. So we’d like to introduce our Data Import view.

The Import view is available if you have an unlimited account (ie any tier above the free account). It allows bulk import of historical data, and attaches the data to a special external-data kitten. This kitten can be dragged and added to other views exactly as if it were one of our own sensor kittens and you can put this data alongside that collected by kittens.

How do I get my data in?

First create an import view as any other by clicking on the Import view in the Create Views selection:

This will create a new Import view:

Data formats

Data is added to the import by dragging a data file to this view. The data file is going to get analysed before it gets imported to your account, so it helps to get it into the right format. Each line needs to include a time and date, and a value, with a comma between the two:

This can be created using Microsoft Excel by saving a spreadsheet with two columns, one for the date time and one for the value, as a .CSV, comma separated value file. In order to get the date and time format right you’ll need to use a custom cell format which can be found in the cell format dialog box:

dd/mm/yyyy hh:mm

(For some Excel users you may find that this format doesn’t exist, but this link explains how to create the custom format you need)

OK, so you’ve got your data file sorted out, now drop it onto the Import view. This should put it to work, first uploading the file, and then checking the contents:

….

Organising your Import Views

If everything went well then that Import view should tell you what it thinks of your data, and offer an import button that you need to press in order to get the data in. Once there just use the new Import kitten just as you would any other (yes, you can rename it just as you can rename the Import view).

We strongly recommend that you keep all your Import views in a dedicated project. This makes it easier to find each Import view when you want to add more data.

You can delete the Import view, it won’t delete the kitten or the data that you’ve already imported, you just won’t be able to add any more data to the kitten.

The small print – some important details

OK, as you might expect there’s a little small print:

You need one Import view for each thing that you want to import data for. Example: if you have three thermostats in a room you will need three Import views.

The Import view should happily eat several 100,000 points in one swallow. We have limited the import to 2MByte files at a time.

You can reuse an Import view as many times as you like, adding data from different times to the Import kitten to build up a complete history.

Sorry, but no, we haven’t worked out how to let you delete the data you’ve just imported. Please be careful to be sure that you are adding the data you actually want.

Yes, you can add data that might overlap the data that you’ve already imported. Our far-to-clever for its own good database will just average the data during those overlapping periods.

The Import view needs you to give it data points in time order. If you try to import data that is all backwards, or where some points are in backwards order then it will do its best but it will reject those points.

If the Import view cannot understand your data file it will warn you and let you try submitting different data:

Pricing

And finally – how much will it cost? We will charge the same amount for an import view as for any other kitten, so depending on the number of end points you are measuring prices will start at £10 per end point, per annum.

This is a new view that will be in beta for the next month so we welcome feedback and bug reports. Enjoy!

Working out the numbers – how many sensors do you need?

24 October 2016 by Hermionec

Often, when we’re talking to customers they will ask us how many sensors they might need. This is a great question because it lets us talk a bit about the applications customers are using the sensors for.

Honestly, we don’t have all the answers on this because we’re still breaking new ground here. There are a lot of potential applications for Purrmetrix that haven’t been tested thoroughly. That said I thought it might be helpful to explain a few rules of thumb we tend to use in answering this question.

TL:DR – it depends upon what you want to achieve with your project. Contact us if you want to talk through the specifics of what you are measuring

How specific is your HVAC analytics project?

Many customers start working with us in exploration mode. They want to identify and pick apart all the problems in their estate. In that case we suggest a fairly high density to start with – a sensor every 10 sq m or one for every cluster of desks. So in a fairly average 60 person office we’d be thinking about 15 – 20 sensors.

In a case where you want to collect data around a known problem, it’s generally possible to be a bit more precise about the numbers, depending on the type of problem you’re looking at.

What sort of problem are you hoping to test?

If you are looking at problems with specific parts of your building services – for example in each fan coil unit – then you have a fairly obvious guide of one or two per FCU. Although kittens can be redeployed its always better in our experience to test all parts of the system simultaneously so allow enough numbers to do that.

On the other hand, you may be interested in how the building’s fabric is performing – how quickly certain parts of the building heat and cool compared with outside temperature. If you think you have generalised insulation problems then 3 or 4 sensors along each aspect can generate quite a lot of information on the rate of heat loss, although you should allow for more if the materials change significantly along each aspect.

Are you analysing or influencing?

If you are hoping to influence behaviour (whether to save energy or helpdesk time) then you need to be presenting data at the hyperlocal level for each person. The ideal extreme would be one for every desk or working area, but in practise we find that a sensor within the same 10 sq m is generally adequate. Remember they can always be moved to accommodate sceptics!

How are you displaying it?

Because monitors are limited in how many pixels they can display the webservice has limitations in the way it displays the image of your building/project, which will be sized to 600 px wide. This generally means it is tricky to display very large areas with a lot of kittens, or make very precise placement of kittens on a low scale (zoomed out) plan.

At this scale it can be tricky to position this number of sensors correctly.

If you do have a project requiring a high density of sensors then make sure you zoom in and use the largest scale plan you have.

How the temperature gradients work

The colour gradient between kittens is not a reflection of the actual temperature in the gradient but of the confidence that it reflects the correct temperature. We don’t vary the size of kitten icon or the spread of the colour gradient so its spread is determined by the scale of the plan or image you upload the kittens above appear to be covering a floor area of around 6 sq m.

You can make the kittens disappear from the plan to better understand what is going on. Do this by clicking the arrow to the left of the view titla:

In general we don’t recommend uploading plans of any building of more than 60 meters.

In summary

You don’t have to get it right first time, because you can redeploy your sensors
Size your order to your use – general exploration and influencing behaviour will take more kittens
Don’t try and display too many kittens in one heatmap view. Use other views (graphing) for that.
Talk to us if you have a problem building and you’re not sure what the right level of diagnostics might be.

Four ways better data will improve your heating season

12 October 2016 by Hermionec

Are you getting the calls? Now its October, we’ve been noticing our heat maps warm up as our customer’s heating systems come on. For a facilities helpdesk, the summer’s steady diet of ‘too hot’ calls start to change – data from IFMA shows complaints of too hot and too cold run at the same rate in the autumn, so if your occupiers can’t make up their minds they’re not alone!

Getting your HVAC strategy right at this time of year can seem like an impossible task, but there are some ways to solve the conundrum and to set yourself up for winter.

Get a handle on temperature complaints

Your occupiers are confused. They have been accustomed to higher summer temperatures and while autumn weather fluctuates, their ability to adapt can’t keep up. So they are likely to feel different levels of comfort even where the temperature is acceptable. To add to the problems building systems may also struggle with temperature swings so some of their complaints will relate to genuine but temporary problems. What is needed is data of the real temperature for occupiers so that help desks can work out the right solution without calling out engineers every time. In this situation, data saves time and money, as well as the energy involved in constantly adjusting heating systems.

Setting up the right heating strategy

When to turn the heating on is a bone of contention in many work places. Some facilities managers run systems for short hours during the shoulder seasons to avoid see windows open and fans being used at the end of a warm autumn afternoon. Others simply aim for a lower temperature. The right answer will vary from building to building, depends on how much control you have, and how your building behaves. Temperature data help you spot the patterns of heat loss and decide which option will work best for your situation.

Call out the heating engineer

Underused over the summer, even well maintained heating systems can be temperamental when started up. A complete failure is easy to spot, but regional problems – broken TRVs in hot water systems, for example – can go unreported until you get into the cold months, leaving facilities managers with a series of small jobs which would be better dealt with in a batch. A comprehensive survey over the first weeks of the heating season to quantify all the problems will save time and complaints in the long run.

Finally, don’t forget the summer

Have you been fighting for budget to do something about HVAC problems all summer, only to have the exec team decide that since cooling is not now needed the decision can be deferred for a few more months? How do you keep making the case, when the ‘too hot’ complaints have died away? Collecting hard data on the extent of the problem defines the problem and creates the business case for intervention.

And in case all this data sounds intimidating or a potential time suck, take a look at our tools for collecting and working with it to tame your temperature problems. Or get in touch with your heating challenge.

Heatmap of the month – cross sections, not cross colleagues

18 September 2016 by Hermionec

This months heat map is a bit of rarity – an example of what happens when you get HVAC right.

To get this impressive cross section of a London office our customers hung kittens on strings at several points along the ceiling. Each string had a number of kittens, spaced a meter apart, to give a vertical grid of temperature sensors.

The office is a converted Victorian industrial building, with a first floor and mezzanine. It houses about 80 employees for a professional services company, and keeps them at the right temperature with a comfort cooling system that delivers cold air through ducts at floor level.

So what are we looking at here? This is three days from July where the external temperature varied from 9°c to 25°c. Even though this office has a huge volume of open space and floor to ceiling in excess of 8 meters, the temperature on the first floor and mezzanine is well controlled. The mezzanine is a degree or two warmer, but rarely gets outside the comfort band.

Just to be controversial we’ve included a Saturday – and a hot one! – when the comfort cooling isn’t operating, to show the huge heat gain that comes through the ceiling and particularly the skylight along the roof ridge. This poses a big challenge for the cooling system at the higher level.

Looking at the view across the desks on the mezzanine for the same period confirms how well the cooling does at keeping employees warm – providing they don’t get too tall.

Is your cooling doing its job? Or do you have a concerns about where your heating ends up? Let us know about your most perplexing HVAC challenge and we’ll help you diagnose what is going on.

Installing Kittens In Your Rack – Data Centre

5 September 2016 by Hermionec

If you have just taken delivery of your first set of kittens ready for deployment in your rack or you are thinking about ordering then I’m hoping to give you all the info you need to get them fitted. It’s not a difficult process and the installation guide will talk you through the basics but there are a few tips that I want to give you to help along the way.

Optimal kit installation:

Our recommended kit for a rack would be a 8 temperature sensors, 1 temperature and humidity sensor and 1 gateway. This is to give you the best coverage and the best visibility of your rack on the heat map.
Fixing your kittens – We have found that it’s best to use the cable ties provided for the data centre environment. It’s warm and dry so it’s not the best conditions for sticky pads, they will work but we prefer the reliability of the cable ties. The doors on the front and back of the racks should be easy to slip the cable ties through.
4 of the kittens should be placed at the front of the rack equally spaced from top to bottom in order to get a full spread of temperatures to see whats going on in the whole rack.
4 of the kittens should be placed in the same way from top to bottom in the back of the rack.
If you have purchased a humidity monitor then try fixing that in the top of the rack to see whats going on overall.
The gateway is going to need power and an ethernet connection. You will be provided with a normal UK plug socket for the power, if you require power over ethernet then just let us know (extra cost).
The gateway will need to be fitted within the rack for best signal, it can be sat on a shelf, on top of a server or better still attached to the top of the rack with cable ties.

Tips:

The kittens sense the temperature from their faces so make sure you face the kitten in the direction that you want the most sensitivity.
Rename the kittens when you get them so you can easily know where they live. You can do this by clicking on the kitten and editing the name (you can also add notes to the notes field).
If you aren’t sure which kitten you have in your hand at any one time just push the kittens nose, till the LED lights up (red for the normal temperature sensors and green for the humidity sensors) and it will flash up on your account.
Don’t forget that you can move the kittens about as much as you like. If you have a problem area in a rack you could alway re group them all around a few machines for a few days or weeks to see whats going on. Just don’t forget to change the names of the kittens and change the heat map so you can see exactly whats going on.
Try playing around with different view for your heat map like the rack views from the front or back, different analytics and even hot or cold alerts to get the best out of your purr account.

If you want some ideas about the kind of insights you can get from the information check out our previous blog: Using onboard monitoring? Here’s four things you’re missing.

Heatwave Hits The UK – What impact is that having in the workplace?

23 August 2016 by Hermionec

As an industry we spend a lot of time thinking about how we can save money on heating, reducing heat loss and plugging draft gaps in our buildings. If your heating breaks down or you have a very bad insulated building then most of the time the odd fluctuation in cold can be dealt with by putting a jumper or a jacket on.

What do you do when it’s too hot in the office?

Too hot in the office is hard to handle. In an office environment there isn’t really much that users can do to keep themselves cool. If you have a strict dress code you really don’t have any options, you still have to wear your suit each day. You might find it hard to concentrate, become very uncomfortable and even lightheaded or dehydrated in extreme cases.

Effect of Temperature on Task Performance in Offfice Environment, Olli Seppänen, William J Fisk, QH Lei (2006)

Extremes of temperature certainly affect productivity. There have been a lot of studies over the years looking at this issue – when you jam all the results together the overall effect seems to be a plateau around 21 – 23° and a decline in performance of about 1% for every degree above 25°

The good news is that there are seasonal effects. If your body is becoming acclimatised to 28° outside the office, it will tolerate slightly higher temperatures inside without too much impact on work performance. This might explain why a studies conducted in Florida by Cornell University found fewer keystroke errors and higher typing rates at 25°, where studies in Helsinki office environment identified more performance issues at 25°.

Office temperatures in the UK.

Sadly the UK is a lot closer to Helsinki than Florida, but this week week will see possible highs of 30 degrees. So what does this mean for our users? Well as you can imagine it’s hot in lots of your offices. During the last UK heatwave we saw temperatures of 39 degrees from one of our kittens! We are talking about a normal office environment and thats clearly not comfortable.

Helpdesk and building managers across the country will be inundated with complaints about the heat. While we might be about to leave the cooling season and many FMs will be tempted to ride out the complaints, creating a more structured policy to deliver staff comfort has many benefits – and it doesn’t always have to mean a total overhaul of building services.

Temporary or permanent solutions?

It’s clear at times like this if you have a cooling problem in your building but relying on complaints doesn’t give you much data to identify what’s causing the problem or where the main problems are. Heatmapping using Purr’s system gives some hard data to help deliver staff comfort in a heatwave:

Identity hotspots.
Understand how well your air conditioning is working or isn’t!
See where the heat in your building is coming from – for example solar gain or occupational gain.
Find out if humidity is also an issue (with our temperature and humidity monitors).
See if solar insulation is an issue – you could look to install blinds or solar reflective film.
Identify where to prioritise temporary measures like fans, stand alone air conditioning units or even where to install more permanent units in the future.

In the UK we don’t always prioritise cooling within our homes or office as the common feeling is that we don’t get much of a summer so its not worth it. However as the climate becomes more variable creating a comfort policy that can deal with a problem that affects productivity and, just as importantly, morale, is going to become a higher priority.

If you interested in finding out more about our heat sensors and the insights you can gain from our services please contact us on 01223 967301 or help@purrmetrix.com

(Image with thanks to Public Domain Pictures)