New Education Session @AHRExpo Chicago  Introduction to Building Automation Systems 11:00AM - 12:00PM ROOM S103A MONDAY, JAN 22

Phil Zito, Building Automation Monthly

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Building Automation Systems: The Primer You Always Wanted one of the over 50 free education sessions at AHR

11:00AM - 12:00PM ROOM S103A MONDAY, JAN 22

Building Automation Systems:The Primer You Always Wanted FREE

Building Automation Systems are quite simple to understand. That may seem like a stretch but this session will provide an interactive analysis of the four-tier building automation architecture. The audience will leave with a thorough understanding of how BAS function and what their purpose is.

Building Automation Systems (BAS) are becoming increasingly more important. The days of manually operating a building are rapidly drawing to a close. After all, it is tough to meet the energy and comfort demands of today’s tenants and building owners with manual operation.

There also is the challenge that many of the senior BAS Professionals are leaving the industry, and you have a potential recipe for disaster.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. A properly utilized a BAS can:

• Increase the mechanical and electrical efficiency of a building
• Augment staff shortages and bridge talent gaps
• Provide direction on how to enhance the comfort and reliability of existing building systems.

The challenge is that a sufficiently utilized BAS rarely comes about by default. It is something that must be intentionally created and utilized.

To do that we must grow our understanding of BAS beyond just controllers and sensors.

Think about your involvement with BAS in the past. Do any of these things sound familiar?

• Specifications that spend dozens of pages describing sensors but only a few paragraphs laying out the graphics standards
• Sites that have so many unacknowledged alarms that the only solution is to wipe the alarm database and start from scratch
• Operators who simply do not know how to use their BAS and are on the verge of purchasing the next whizzbang feature when they aren’t even using basic reporting and trending capabilities.
  

So when we look at the question, “What is a BAS” we can quickly realize that is the wrong question. We should be asking ourselves What could a BAS be?

• Could a BAS be a part of your maintenance strategy, automatically detecting and reporting specific events?
  
• Could a BAS be a part of your energy management strategy, analyzing and detecting issues and making adjustments in real-time to drive efficiencies?
• Could a BAS be part of your operational strategy, allowing you to train once and operate many times by adopting naming, graphics, and point standards that enable techs to understand the systems across multiple buildings?

A BAS is so much more than its parts and pieces.

A properly implemented BAS is part of your processes and procedures. The result is that you’re able to use existing BAS features in ways that allow you to achieve greater efficiencies from the same amount of effort.

It is these exact topics that we will discuss in the session titled, Building Automation Systems: The Primer You Always Wanted at the ASHRAE Expo in Chicago.

Those who attend this session will leave with an understanding of what a BAS is along with clear, actionable steps that they can take to improve how they utilize and design BAS going forward.