The plant behind the building
A commercial building is experienced as space: floors, rooms, light and air. It functions as a collection of machines. Chillers and boilers condition the building. Pumps circulate water. Fans move air. Motors, compressors and electrical equipment sit in plant rooms, on rooftops and above ceilings, running for most of the year.
When that equipment works, no one thinks about it. When it fails, the effect is immediate and visible: an overheated floor, a ward without ventilation, a tenant complaint, an emergency call-out at a premium rate.
Why buildings are hard to maintain well
Facilities teams face a particular combination of pressures. They are responsible for a large number of assets of many types and ages. The assets are spread through a building, or across many buildings. Budgets are tight, and in-house expertise in vibration analysis or thermography is rare.
Building management systems help, and they are designed for control. They report setpoints, temperatures and alarms. They can tell an engineer that an air handler has tripped. They rarely indicate that its fan bearing has been deteriorating for six weeks.
The result in practice is that a great deal of building equipment is maintained on a fixed schedule and repaired when it breaks.
How AFFERENT is designed to help
The requirement in commercial facilities is breadth. There are many assets, most of them modest in individual value, and a system has to cover them economically. A compact device that installs quickly and needs little setup is the natural fit, which is the intended role of NODE Mini. Larger plant, such as chillers and major pumps, may warrant NODE Industrial.
Each device is designed to learn the normal behavior of the asset it is attached to, including daily and seasonal patterns, and to identify change. Because analysis runs on the device, a deployment does not depend on streaming large volumes of data over a building's network.
For owners and operators of several properties, AFFERENT Cloud is designed to provide a single view across a portfolio: which buildings have equipment that needs attention, and which assets within them.
What changes for a facilities team
- Fewer surprises. Developing problems are identified while there is time to schedule a repair.
- Better use of contractors. Service visits can be directed to equipment with a known issue.
- Evidence for capital planning. Replacement decisions can draw on the measured condition of equipment, not its age alone.
- Efficiency. Equipment in poor mechanical condition often consumes more energy than it should. Finding and correcting faults supports energy performance as well as reliability.
- Continuity for occupants. In hospitals, laboratories and other sensitive buildings, avoiding an unplanned loss of ventilation or cooling is a matter of safety.
