134-138 Edmund Street

Smart building systems can provide transparency of the building services operation and performance which can allow users to:

1. Identify plant operational anomalies
2. Provide live online environment where anomalies are turned into workflow
3. Facilitate collaboration between operational teams and senior stakeholders
4. Measure and verify savings
5. Highlight slip back

Significant cost and carbon savings can be achieved through analysing and optimising the use of the plant: As is common in building services operations a lot of the plant was operating 24/7 and un-seasonally – i.e. cooling systems operating in winter. This is likely due to FM teams responding to complaints from occupants – e.g. hot and cold calls. Such actions often lead to drastic changes to temperature setpoints in response to a complaint, subsequently causing conflict between adjacent heating and cooling systems. This in turn leads to further complaints and further inappropriate control changes. As complaints increase further measures are often taken such as increasing plant operational hours in attempts to establish better control.

Early collaboration with FM team, operations team and tenants is key: It is important to ensure that FM teams are informed of the processes in advance and given the mandate to dedicate maintenance hours to energy conservation measures. In turn, tenants must be consulted to ensure efforts to reduce energy consumption do not lead to poor internal environmental conditions.

The Demand Logic software platform that was used on this project facilitates collaboration between the relevant teams, and Grosvenor is considering opening this up to tenants as part of ongoing engagement initiatives.