Installation

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.

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.

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.

Using onboard monitoring? Here’s four things you’re missing.

14 July 2016 by Hermionec

If your server, rack or cage is in one of the UK’s established and well run data centres you can probably guarantee that they are going to keep the temperature within a fairly well controlled temperature range (unless something goes very wrong).

You also probably already have onboard temperature monitoring in your servers, disk arrays and switches so I bet you have never thought about any other type of temperature sensing or even mapping.

But if you’re simply looking at onboard data the chances are you are actually missing out on a lot of interesting, actionable information. Lets talk about the useful stuff that we at Purrmetrix can help you learn.

1. Locating a Hot Spot.

When you look at your onboard monitors you get a number on a screen – maybe even a graph. But how – and where – does that fit in to the bigger picture and I mean that literally. By putting data into a heat map you can see instantly how that all fits in. Is the machine you are looking at the actual problem? Is it a wider issue in the rack with air flow? Is it one of the machines next to it? A picture paints a thousand words after all. You could use this information to help you to make a better informed choice about where to fit your next piece of kit or how to set up the next rack you buy.

2. Tracking access to racks

If you have 3rd party engineers accessing your kit for maintenance, replacing kit or just remote hands from the DC to check something out for you wouldn’t you like to know bit more about what they are up to? When they opened the door, which racks they accessed, how long they left the door open for while they walked away from the DC floor or even if they left the doors open when they left. Yes the data that you get from the kittens really are that sensitive as the picture below shows.

3. Remedying problem rack conditions

So what can you tell from the kittens that we believe can help you find out a bit more about whats going on when a fault occurs: if the temperature of the air coming into the rack has risen, if the air flow is being obstructed, someone has been into your rack, the humidity (only with the temperature and humidity monitors) has got up which could suggest a leak or a liquid spill, heat from a next door rack is effecting your rack etc. You could set up alerting in your account so that you can be informed when things go out of your preferred parameters.

4. Analysing what went wrong

Lets say that you had a total network meltdown and you really didn’t have time to study exactly what was going on in your rack regarding temperature. That’s ok because you can go back and replay the data when you have the chance. You might not have been able to figure out what happened or why. Perhaps the same scenario keep cropping up and causing a disk to fail or kit a server to reboot. You could find that there is some small event that is causing the issue or even that now you know how it shows up on the data you could recognise it sooner, set up an alert and stop it from causing the issue before it starts.

The importance of time and space.

There are a lot of possibilities but only with the correct level of monitoring. To make sense of the data you need to have information on where it is coming from, as well as when, and you can’t get this just from your onboard sensing. It’s time to bring our thinking up to date.

If you think all of this sounds interesting then ordering a starter kit would be great place to start. A medium bundle contains 1 gateway and 8 kittens, this would do the trick for one rack with 4 in the front and 4 in the back spaced equally from top to bottom. If you want to have a chat to us about your current step up, problems you think you may have and how best you can detect them using kittens then you can contact us on 01223 967301 or help@purrmetrix.com

Liz Fletcher is Purrmetrix’s project manager. After nearly a decade in IT, miles of cabling and gallons of tea she is currently dividing her time between Purrmetrix and the UKNOF Programme Committee.