The winning hand

The way a building’s energy use is managed must keep up with the shift towards more flexible working hours, as highlighted in last month’s news analysis. In short, dynamism is one of the newest items on the lengthening list of essential requirements for the 21st century building.

The latest advance to facilitate the need to keep up to speed with these changes in building energy management, is the introduction of handheld devices. While handhelds have been around as part of system controls for a reasonable length of time, their functionality has been little more than that of a key pad, which when plugged into a network, could only perform the simplest of tasks. The real monitoring and controlling of the system was still carried out on the conventional laptop. However, even this advance in practicality, which enabled end users to walk around site with an easy to handle pc, has been surpassed with the introduction of handheld devices.

In a statement released last October, Shafique Shah, marketing manager for Invensys climate controls said: “Handheld devices, using Microsoft Windows CE, will provide the ulimate easy and practical way of accessing building energy management systems over the internet. Wireless and internet protocol technology will empower the front line energy managers while giving the corporate energy team a realtime view of the overall picture. ”

Handheld system interaction

A few months down the line, Shah spoke to BSJ about how the handheld device that his organisation offers, gives end users the advantage when it comes to interacting with their system: “The XDA is the name that telecommunications company O₂ has given to the product, and it is effectively a mobile phone that runs Microsoft Win CE. By connecting it in the same way that you would connect a Win CE into the network, it gives you the same index display, the same access to a lot of information.”

The XDA (like the one pictured) is used to operate the Sigma system developed by Invensys, a system that enables localised control of certain parts of a building. Occupants can be allocated a specific level of access that can be limited to as little as their office, and can control the lighting or heating remotely from the handheld tool. Shah explains some other functions: “One of the things it gives you remotely or wirelessly is effectively alarm notification. A plant engineer for example can be wandering around anywhere, can get these alarm notifications, and can then make a phone call or connect up to a network point and see what the system is doing, and maybe take some first line action.”

Commissioning made easier

The immediate advantage that is illustrated by this level of access is the time saving element, something that Dave Robinson, technical director at Robell Control Systems sees as a major plus. As an installer of fan coil unit controls, his organisation uses the Palm OS handheld tool for commissioning the units. Robinson makes the simple observation that using the tool brings the bonuses of less time, less money, and less equipment required: “The Palm tool lowers the cost of commissioning fan coil units and it lowers the amount of technology that you have to take to site. It’s time saving and money saving and it requires less training to operate the tool. Tasks can be performed by less experienced operatives so the technology is more accessible. The end user just has to plug it into a wall port to do the job, that’s much easier than trying to do it with a laptop.”

So with the benefits apparent, one would expect the specification and take up on the use of hand held devices to be rapidly growing as bems moves on to the next level. But as with everything new, scepticism is the watchword for the construction industry, and the perception of the use of handhelds is no different.

Cylon Controls launched its first handheld device in 1999, and has graduated since then to offer the Palm OS as the device used to operate their Unitron controls system. But marketing director Stuart Aynsley says its still some way from having a firm foothold: “Its is a very good marketing tool but take up has been slower than we expected it to be. The reason for that is that we are in a mechanical market and the people we are dealing with aren’t ‘techno junkies’. They like to see something become established first. A new control system takes a minimum of 12 months before it becomes a mainstream product. The Palm product hasn’t been out for 12 months yet.”

Aynsley also believes there has been a change in the target audience for handhelds: “When we first came into the market the motivation was to help the commissioning engineers, now the emphasis is on delivery of technology to the end user.”

The simplicity of the technology, and the ease of use for the end users that the newest devices offer are, claims Shah, the key to showing them that these products are the way forward for system management: “It is still in its infancy, in the design of your traditional building energy management system, the CE doesn’t get a mention. We see it as a potential emerging technology, but not standard yet. The XDA comes somewhere between a keypad and a laptop, and the end users and facilities managers are seeing the benefits of this for themselves.”

Dr Sajed Husein, technical manager at Invensys, explains that the handheld tools aren’t suited to every building, and their advantages are far greater in certain situations than others: “Because of the steel structure of tall buildings, the phone reception is very weak, so a mobile phone device like the XDA is not very useful. When you go into a campus environment, where the building is spread over a large area, the XDA becomes a very powerful tool. The facilities manager, regardless of where he or she is can call into the system and do remote monitoring or remote maintenance of the plant.”

Ensuring user security

There are security issues that need to be addressed however. If a scenario should arise where a handheld device like the Palm OS or the XDA falls into the wrong hands, there could be serious consequences. The way the software is set up needs to take this kind of eventuality into consideration, as Husein explains: “That is a possible downside. With this device, anybody could go and tamper with a building. To access the system you need some kind of authorisation which is built into your software, so you would potentially have a password to get in. It depends how the software is set up, so you could have a pc with password being just ‘password’ and anyone can access that. It’s up to the user to make sure that they are well configured when the security is taken into account.”

Husein also points out though, that the locality of control that the Invensys Sigma system offers would act as a safeguard in such a situation: “You have localised control of your specific area, so if someone was to steal the XDA, they couldn’t use it maliciously because it is only set up to deal with one particular area.”

With the perpetual forward motion of the capabilities of technology, the future for the handheld will be to discard the need to physically connect up to the system in order to make alterations or perform monitoring duties of plant. This, says Husein, is the next leap to be made for buidling energy management systems: ”We’ve been doing research to look into the dial up capability of the XDA, and this is where the missing link is at present. Its two functions as a mobile phone and a CE dont talk to each other at the moment. That is the shortcoming of the product, but if that problem was sorted out tomorrow, the software that we have today would give you remote interaction. That’s where we want to go.”

Legislation and modernising working practices are forcing change upon building energy management. Personal digital assistants are already replacing the filofax as a way for many people to organise their lives. If the same technology can be integrated with software needed to manage a building’s energy systems, that combination will help to make transition into the future as smooth as possible.