Building technology has been a primary focus of engineering since the first permanent human civilizations existed thousands of years ago. As the human population expanded, the need for better building materials, more efficient uses of space, and more streamlined occupational systems grew. These technologies became increasingly complex and advanced.
There have been many milestones in building technology, such as the invention of concrete and steel, the creation of the refrigeration cycle (which runs air-conditioning systems), high-efficiency insulation, and smart building applications.
Smart buildings are an unofficial class of buildings that feature advanced sensor, control, management, and compute technologies that aim to increase the efficiency, lower the cost, and increase the usability of buildings. This article examines smart building technologies and identifies the positive impacts and benefits of their use in the modern age.
Smart Building Efficiency
The premier advantage of utilizing smart building IoT technology is its ability to create more efficient systems in a building. With all building systems connected to a single, smart IoT network, a smart building can provide optimized efficiency to minimize power consumption and downtime due to maintenance.
Lighting
Before the advent of smart building technology, lighting within a building was controlled by manual switches, which required that they be turned on and off by their operators. In smart buildings, smart lights can be controlled by the simple presence of people.
In an office building, which is generally occupied for only 12 hours in a day, accidentally leaving the lights on can lead to inefficient building power consumption and reduced product lifetime. In modern smart buildings, individual space lighting can be independently controlled by a smart building system or space-specific lighting sensors so that all out-of-use lighting fixtures can be powered down.
Learn more about smart office technologies and sensors being used today.
Climate Control
Mechanical systems such as air conditioning and heating sub-systems in buildings also consume massive amounts of energy. They feature extremely complex components that, when broken, can cause extreme inconveniences to maintenance staff and building occupants. These systems are often centralized and service individual spaces or the entire building.
When these spaces are not in use, these systems still consume power to treat the space, which can be extremely inefficient and cause unnecessary component wear. Additionally, some advanced smart building systems can even detect anomalies in system operation to signify that maintenance may be eminent.
As an example, different spaces in a building can reach vastly different temperatures depending on the building’s construction or orientation towards the sun. If you’ve ever sat in a large, old conference room alone, you may have found yourself uncomfortably cold. In traditional buildings, the mechanical systems were not overly sophisticated, and the air conditioning system was likely designed to handle the maximum occupancy, thereby cooling it to a comfortable temperature for a large number of occupants but overcooling it for a single person.
Smart buildings use a plethora of sensors such as temperature and humidity, light, and occupational sensors to combat overuse, such as in the large, old conference room example. These sensors optimize the building’s mechanical and electrical system usage. Improved efficiency can dramatically reduce energy consumption and limit the amount of wear-and-tear on expensive and complex systems, thereby extending the life of the building’s components.
Smart Building Cost
While reducing energy consumption has massive benefits to energy companies, the power grid, and the planet, the most attractive aspect of increasing building efficiency (to building owners) is the cost reduction. In some industries, power consumption is not limited to the systems that run the building but can also be influenced by the equipment within the building.
In industrial manufacturing buildings, large equipment consumes massive amounts of energy when in use. Depending on local energy-consumption rules, certain “Time of Use” price increases can be incurred if a building breaches its allotted energy consumption during certain hours of the day or a set period of time.
Smart buildings can curb the risk of Time of Use cost penalties by intelligently tracking power consumption throughout the day and moderating usage to fall within the allowable limits. Smart buildings can modulate building heating and cooling systems to avoid these penalties, such as overcooling or storing energy in ‘off-hours’ to subsequently turn off the cooling system while manufacturing systems are running. These smart building monitoring systems can create a massive cost-saving benefit for the building owner, even though the net amount of energy used by the building may be the same.
Smart Building Usability
The most advanced smart buildings in the world, cognitive buildings, are on the bleeding edge of smart building technology. Cognitive buildings can provide incredible usability benefits to occupants. For example, Deloitte’s Netherlands headquarter building, The Edge, has acted as a recruiting tool that appeals to prospective employees.
Cognitive buildings can assign parking based on arrival and departure dates, allow occupants to select preferred lighting and heating/cooling settings, auto connect multimedia devices, optimize building occupancy to best fit the needs of the user, and much more. And while cognitive smart buildings have only recently started to come into existence, the benefit they provide to their individual occupants may fuel the smart building revolution well into the future.
Benefits of IoT Smart Buildings
The advantage of smart buildings over traditional buildings can be condensed into a single word: optimization. Intelligent IoT smart systems can monitor, track, control, and optimize a smart building’s systems to increase energy efficiency, lower operation costs, and provide state-of-the-art occupational usability standards. Beyond this, IoT smart buildings are a culmination of a vast number of different technologies. Additionally, the engineering challenge of designing a smart building IoT system is beneficial to other sectors that can reuse the processes of smart building technology creation.
