The client had previously deployed a one-meter-per-store monitoring program. Given the manner in which energy consumption changes with external temperature, hour of the day, day of week and month of year, a single meter solution lacked the ability to detect the difference between a true problem and a changing store environment. Most importantly, a single meter solution could never identify root cause of energy consumption changes. This approach never reduced the number of truck-rolls or man-hours required to find and resolve issues.

The building was equipped with four end-of-life Trane water cooled chillers, located in the basement. Johnson Controls installed four York water cooled centrifugal chillers with unit mounted variable speed drives and a total installed cooling capacity of 6,8 MW. Each chiller has a capacity of 1,6 MW (variable to 1.9MW depending upon condenser water temperatures). Johnson Controls needed to design the equipment in such way that it would fit the dimensional constraints of the existing plant area and plant access route but also the specific performance requirements of the client. Morgan Stanley required the chiller plant to match the building load profile, turn down to match the low load requirement when needed and provide an improvement in the Energy Efficiency Ratio across the entire operating range. Other requirements were a reduction in the chiller noise level to improve the working environment in the plant room and a wide operating envelope coupled with intelligent controls to allow possible variation in both flow rate and temperature. The latter was needed to leverage increased capacity from a reduced number of machines during the different installation phases and allow future enhancement to a variable primary flow system.

During the energy crisis of the 1970’s there was a sea-change in the building industry when it paid more attention to the idea of conserving energy and introduced the terms Building Management System (BMS) and Building Automation System (BAS). Continuing rising energy prices and carbonreduction issues have also further spurred the development and deployment of BMS in recent years. However, the early systems were bulky, not user friendly, unreliable, and very expensive. With the advent of computerization, BMS analog signals became digitized so as to be communicated over long distance as well as facilitating the building management process these issues became less.Due to the multiple many management functions and wide range of expertise, modern BMS is quite complex. Successful building management not only needs to link to a multitude of devices but also take account of the suitability of the software for the intended application. Equipped with a web browser-based software package for human-machine interfaces (HMI) and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) which provides automated, centralized and unattended management with a high degree of electronic accuracy, the BMS can fully control the building’s mechanical and electrical equipments and thus effectively monitor energy consumption so that it provides a comfortable, safe and secure environment.Property management is facing various and complex challenges and reducing operating costs have become increasingly important for building owners. As a result, a growing number of new and refitted buildings are being designed to use less energy and focus on the building’s performance. A System Integrator was helping a builder implement advanced BMS for its newest construction project in a creative park in Asia. The construction, a 14-storey building with four underground floors, covers an area of nearly one hundred thousand square meters and contains three distinct sectors - shopping mall, hotel guest room floors and office floors. In order to provide optimal energy management, this BMS needed to be capable of monitoring and controlling a variety of facilities, including air conditioning, power system, plumbing system, fire system, ventilation, elevator, lighting, garden watering and so on. Meanwhile, using one system with an adequate number of nodes in a main control room to manage three different places was a key requirement but each place had to have their own dedicated system and can be controlled independently without mutual interference so as to saving the implementation costs. Due to the need to monitor many areas, there would be tens of thousands of detection points, and the new system also needed to offer remote control capabilities so that building managers or patrol staff can view the status of various facilities in real-time and deal with issues using handheld or mobile devices.