Automated monitoring provides continuous monitoring of building energy systems and can alert a facility manager to performance or comfort issues, saving time and money.

Summary:

Commissioning, retro-commissioning, re-commissioning, and automated monitoring and fault detection (also referred to as automated commissioning) are all systematic methods of ensuring that a building and its hardware perform to the level intended by the owner and design team. Buildings that are running properly benefit from reduced maintenance, quality indoor environments, and lower energy costs. Using only energy savings, the median payback for retro- and recommissioning is less than a year and approximately five years for new construction commissioning.

As sensor technology, building control networks, and building supervisory software have evolved into building automation systems (BAS), better information about building performance has become available to building operators. Most modern BAS offer alarm filters that may be set for out-of-range conditions and detecting critical component faults. An emerging use of these capabilities is the application of sophisticated algorithms to detect hidden problems that are usually discovered in a formal commissioning process. However, commissioning and retro-/re-commissioning lack the advantage of continuing to monitor and identify issues, which automated monitoring offers. The automated process can be as simple as helping building operators gather data or as powerful as actively testing the hardware and conducting reprogramming and recalibrations. This Design Brief discusses developments in research and commercially available automated monitoring systems.