23 min read

SBA 244: Ask Me Anything- Buying a BAS Part 2

By Phil Zito on Apr 5, 2021 6:00:00 AM

Topics: Podcasts

Are you considering purchasing or designing a building automation system?

If so you need to listen to this episode!

On this week's podcast we continue to answer the questions our listeners have related to selecting, upgrading, or buying a BAS.

We received over 140+ questions and in this episode, we dive into 17 more questions.

In this episode we cover

What is a cloud hosted BAS?
How should I change my BAS post COVID?
Can I implement touchless BAS and Temp control how?
How can I get my operators to use analytics?
Should I get a BAS or just use smart equipment?
How important are mobile friendly graphics?
How do I determine what level of cybersecurity I should have?
Should I have multiple systems on my campus? Why or why not?
How do I manage contractors if I do owner direct work?
How can I build a BAS standard?
What is the most important area for me to spend money on a BAS?
How do you balance comfort with energy efficiency?
Should customers know how to program their BAS?
What are the most common troubleshooting issues?
How do I budget for BAS projects?
How do I avoid being locked into a single contractor?
Should I integrate multiple systems into a single pane of glass?

Click here to download or listen to this episode now.

Resources mentioned in this episode

Tax Day Course Sale

Building Automation Cyber Security

Creating Your Own BAS Standard

Space Control Live Stream

BAS Glossary Guide

How to Evaluate a BAS Guide

BAS for Operators Online Course

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Show notes

Phil Zito 0:00
This is the smart buildings Academy podcast with Phil Zito Episode 244 Hey folks, Phil Zito here and welcome to Episode 244 of the smart buildings Academy podcast. And in this episode we are going to be continuing our Ask me anything series on buying a building automation system. So thank you to all of you who have been sending in your questions. We stood up another email address you can now send in questions to marketing at smart buildings Academy comm once again that is marketing at smart buildings Academy comm that's where you can send your questions related to the podcast because we've been getting a lot of them and I want to make sure they kind of go to a single place so that we get them answered. Everything we discussed today can be found at podcasts at smart buildings Academy comm forward slash 244. Once again, that's podcast at smart buildings academy.com forward slash 244. A couple things to update you on real quick before we dive into today's episode. First off, if you've been looking at buying one of our courses, our Tax Day Sale is still going on until the 15th of April. And that enables you to take 20% off any of our courses with the coupon code tax day. That's one word ta XDA. Why use that at checkout, I'll take 20% off the cost of your courses. Also, we have been working daily on our building automation acronym guide. So you'll see that linked in the notes at podcast at smart buildings Academy comm for slash 244 I encourage you to read through that continue to provide us feedback at marketing at smart buildings academy.com let us know what we can add to that guide. My vision for this is to be adding videos and text definitions and blog posts daily for at least the next 365 days to this guide, it's completely free. There's no opt in and should become a great resource to our industry for folks looking just for fundamental knowledge. Finally, we also are rolling out several new courses, our building automation basics just rolled out, we're going to be rolling out in IQ strategies for building automation for those of you reopening your buildings, we're gonna be rolling out a touchless strategies for building automation, how to use building automation systems to create a touchless experience. And we are going to be going and rolling out our workforce development program in the very near future. Okay, with all of that out of the way, let's dive in to 17 questions this time about buying a building automation system. Once again, as I mentioned, you can go to marketing at smart buildings academy.com to submit your questions, and we will answer them in future episodes. So what is a cloud hosted va? s? This question came into us a couple of weeks ago actually, we just didn't get a chance to get to it. And it's a great question. Because you see, at least on LinkedIn, a lot of messaging around VA s as a Service Cloud hosted VA s and I've heard several of our customers come to us on the owner operator side and say that they were considering getting a cloud hosted VA s so what is it? Well, I'll tell you what it's not at least as of right now what it's not. And that is it's not a complete building automation system hosted in the cloud, you still have physical controllers, as far as I can see on the majority of the systems out there, you still have supervisory devices. It is largely the server capabilities that are cloud hosted. So what I want to talk about is basically what is the cloud? How is B as hosted on the cloud? And then what do you need to consider as someone potentially buying, selecting or scoping a building automation system? Well, the cloud quite simply as someone else's data center, that's all it is. If you have a data center and one of your buildings, think about this massive data center, kind of in, you know, Virginia, in Oregon, wherever here in Wisconsin, we have one down in, I think it's Northbrook, Illinois. And these data centers are filled with computers. And these computers basically act as timeshares. Right, you can rent part of the computer or all of the computer for a certain amount of time, usually at a monthly cost. Well, what these building automation providers are doing is they're taking their server capabilities, their analytics capabilities, a bunch of their more advanced higher level capabilities, and they're placing them in the cloud. It's easier for them to manage upgrades and see easier for them to manage versioning. And they go and charge you a reoccurring cost instead of a capital cost. Now, what a cloud hosted VA S is not it is not replacing supervisory devices as of yet. And definitely not replacing controllers and i O, I've seen some folks message around that that's not happening. So is a cloud hosted be as good for you? Well, potentially, if you have one site, and you want some of that server capability, but you don't want the server, then it may be good for you to go and cloud host your BBs and connect that supervisory device into that cloud service. And the reason I say that is because you're paying a predictable monthly cost, that's an operational cost that you can usually shed pretty easy, rather than a capital cost. And you don't need to maintain those IT assets, which is difficult for smaller buildings. If you're a medium sized business, I don't really find cloud hosted bi s to be very practical for you. So now, that being said, if you are a large business, I find that cloud has to be as can be practical for you. But it can also not be practical for you at the same time. If you're going after a cloud VA s because you want the analytics, you want the always updated software, you want all of that, and you're not a critical environment, then cloud has to be as probably pretty good for you. If you're like a hospital or a data center or something, I would recommend keeping stuff on prem, which means keeping it in your data center. Alright, how should I change my VA s post COVID? Well, this is actually a course that we're going to be coming up with around IAA Q and B, A S. But let's cover kind of the highlights of this. Because this is a very pertinent question. First thing around VA S is going in and analyzing that everything is online. basically doing a site audit before you can go and make any sequence changes whether you know you adopt ashtrays recommendations, or the CDC recommendations or whoever's recommendations, you first need to make sure everything is working. So step one, is go and analyze your system. Understand that everything's online and everything's functioning. Step two, analyze your capacity, a lot of the IQ recommendations tie to increased ventilation. And with that increased ventilation, and that kind of wider range on humidity, you are going to have potential capacity issues, especially during design day scenarios. So understand those potential capacity impacts. And what that means to your business. Do you need to upsize your plant? Do you need to maybe raise your setpoint a little, I can't tell you what that would be, that's going to be a case by case basis, it's something we'll dive deep into in our IQ course. But that being said, What I can tell you is that if you look at your system, and if it's already over capacity, right now, we're not even in design day conditions, you're struggling, then when you start to introduce enhanced ventilation, so greater outdoor air, greater air changes, greater air velocity, your capacity is most likely not going to be able to keep up and so you got to make a decision is comfort your primary priority, which I mean, that's a struggle, right, you can go and do the increased ventilation, you can bring in more outside air that you have to condition, but then maybe you're not providing the comfort level. And we are trying to get tenants to come back in the building. So it's a delicate balance of Am I going to increase ventilation to potentially make the air healthier? Am I going to just introduce ionization and UV and call it a day? Or am I going to just accept that I don't have system capacity. And I'm going to focus on comfort because if people aren't comfortable, they're not just going to keep coming into a building that they don't have to necessarily come into. So you've got that aspect. And then there's the dashboarding aspect of things, right? Can you pull data out of your building automation system to make the data visible? And can you parse that data in such a way that it actually makes logical sense to an untrained observer so that an occupant could walk in a building and go, Oh, I understand what this dashboard means. It means my buildings healthy, maybe it's like a green, yellow, red dashboard. Whatever you do, don't like start putting, you know, Pascal's of pressure or whatever on a dashboard and expect people to understand what the heck they're looking at. It's not going to make a lot of sense to them. You got to remember the audience and whatever you do, can I implement touchless ba s and temperature control how? Yeah, I mean, you certainly can it depends on the building automation system. The majority of building automation system dums do support mobile interfaces, you don't necessarily have to go buy a solution like comfy or whatever other solutions out there these days that is focused on occupant control and occupant feedback, you can definitely work with your provider. And most of them have a mobile friendly interface The challenge with mobile friendly interfaces, that kind of comfy addresses, I don't think comfy addresses the you I don't think the UI is necessarily the problem, although they would argue that that's part of the problem. The biggest problem, I see that these third party solution providers address is user management. That's the biggest challenge is having users being able to access the system and be able to go and change temperatures. And then how do you manage which user has priority. So there's a couple ways you can do this, you can use a third party, device and software provider, right. And that can be a formal software provider like a comfy, right. Or it can be a informal software provider, like a developer who simply pulls via the API data out of your building automation system, and puts it into a graphical front end, I think there's a real opportunity, just for those of you listening who are product providers, for people to consume data from building automation systems via BACnet interfaces. And to feed that into pretty looking graphical interfaces. And to manage that user layer. There's going to be a lot of people who want touchless tamp control, touchless, lighting, control, touchless conveyance control, so that's elevators. And those are like the three big things, right? Also touchless access control. So those would be like the four big things, temperature, lighting, conveyance and access control. And if you can manage those kind of four things, you're going to remove a lot of touching within the space, which I mean, I'm not going to get into whether that works or doesn't work. But it is something that is definitely Top of Mind on a lot of people's minds as they reoccupy buildings. So think through that, how can I get my operators to use analytics? This is an age old question, right? There's been two barriers to adoption of analytics one has been the cost, right? You go. And you have to normalize all the data, you have to map in all the data, you have to get the data into the system. And that still to this day is pretty resource intensive, especially with legacy systems, and in my opinion, is one of the biggest barriers to adoption of analytics is that first cost implementation. Now the second barrier to analytics, which we you know, we really have to be cognizant of, is getting people to actually use the analytics. So there's kind of three issues that I've seen, having sold analytics in the past, having deployed analytics in the past and training people. What I've seen is the three barriers to analytics is first cultural, right? Do you even have a culture of maintenance? Do you have a culture of avoidance or a culture of maintenance, if you have a culture of avoidance, people are going to avoid analytics like the plague, because it's going to show that they're not doing their job. And that's going to be very scary. I've heard that firsthand from a lot of people who are like, it's just going to show that my people aren't doing their jobs, or it's going to make them overwhelmed. So do you have a culture of avoidance or a culture of maintenance? The second thing would be Do you even have the aptitude to interpret the results? And this varies based on analytic solution, some analytic solutions provide great guidance on whether or not you need to do something. And others are, you know, really meant for data scientists and operators should not be looking at them because they don't make any sense. And then the third thing is, Do you even have the capabilities to execute what the analytics are pointing out? So let's assume you have the culture, right? The culture is very proactive, your maintenance focused, you've got a good maintenance program, you have people who can reasonably understand hv AC sequences, they can reasonably understand what the analytics is saying. But do you have the resources both in technical capability as well as in monetary ability to go and reconcile the issues that the analytics are pointing out? Now, to this point, I've been largely talking about fault detection analytics. I should clarify that in the beginning. There are regression based analytics and those are analytics that look at past data sets. They compare them to you know, in environmental variables, etc. to do both projections of cost as well as utilization. Those analytics are a little bit easier to use. In my opinion, they're less immediately impactful, they're better for strategy. And for making investment decisions, like, Hey, we can see where we're wasting. And we can make an investment decision based on a potential ROI based on the data. But they're less effective for actual maintenance. So just want to be clear on that. Should I get a VA s or just use smart equipment, smart equipment is really interesting. So for those of you who have not been in the industry for a long time, we've done this weird kind of cyclical pattern, where we started off with application specific controls. So that was kind of the first big thing with DDC direct digital controls, were they were application specific, you'd flip some DIP switches, do some QA Question and Answer selection, and you will get a program but you had no real ability to program it, then came out freely programmable controllers. And this was really cool, the engineers could write whatever sequence they wanted, everything was all well and good. But then we started to go back to the application specific controllers in the form of smart equipment, where you have this equipment that shipped with application specific controllers on it, as well as kind of analytics built into the cloud. And you're able to then go and analyze this data, right? So with this with this capability of smart buildings, and with this capability of smart equipment, rather, you are now able to put a building automation system in without a building automation system. So if you're in a light commercial environment, if you're in an office space environment, smart equipment may be the path you want, in lieu of building automation system. How important are mobile friendly graphics? It just depends. So what depends on how important mobile friendly graphics are is one, once again, your culture are people actually going to use them to does it fit into your troubleshooting and maintenance process. If you primarily have a dispatch model, where people have Central Dispatch, that triage is like level one triage, and then dispatches level two to go work on stuff. mobile friendly graphics may not be as important. But if you have a very mobile facility team, and they are constantly on the move, then mobile friendly graphics may be important. But you also have to have the infrastructure to support this. If you're building automation system data is not available through the wireless network on your sites, and is only available through like a hardwire connection to a client that's sitting in the facilities office, then mobile friendly graphics really aren't going to do much. How do I determine what level of cybersecurity I should have? We've done an episode on this. So I'm going to refer to this episode in the show notes. I'm just going to actually make a note, refer to cyber episode. But basically, whenever you're approaching cybersecurity, it's an analysis of the likelihood of the risk, how much the risk would impact you. And then based on how much the risk would impact you, in dollars, times the likelihood of the risk.

Phil Zito 18:19
That equals the amount of money you should spend on cybersecurity. I will tell you, I'm not a doom and gloom cybersecurity guy. I know there's a lot of companies out there that make quite a bit of money on you believing that you need to have you know, Pentagon level cybersecurity for your office building. That's not the case. Really even worst case, someone hacks in and gets into your building automation system, and they turn down the temperature in your building doesn't really do much to an office building. As far as profitability loss. Yeah, the tenants may be unhappy for a little bit, but it's completely different than like a hospital or lab or a data center, where you definitely should invest in cybersecurity, because business continuity can be threatened by environmental issues. Should I have multiple systems on my campus? Why or why not? It really depends if you're not going to self maintain, and you are not going to have a strong facility group. Then whether you have multiple systems or a single system, it just comes down to a procurement conversation. And are there vendors my rule of thumb with any any system is are there multiple vendors that can service that system? So I highly suggest you don't buy a no name brand building automation system just because it's low bid, because you'll really struggle to find people to service it. That being said, if you have a solid facility team that I recommend you stick with a single brand and here's why. Or at least have a really solid VA s standard. Because if you train your team on a single solution, and you have a strong standard so that every building New looks relatively the same, even if they have different pieces of equipment, the point names are the same, the interfaces look the same, then you only have to train once, and it makes it much easier. And it will reduce a lot of cost from a maintenance perspective. That being said, if you have no desire to maintain your buildings, and you're really just kind of winging it, and you just got some glorified, you know, janitors that you call mechanics, then in that case, yeah, go and bid low bid to your heart's content, just make sure that there's plenty of contractors to service, whatever low bid system you select. I'm not opposed to low bid. I just, it's right in the right scenario when it's wrong in the wrong scenario. Alright, how do I manage contractors? If I do owner direct work? Great question. So the first thing you need to do is have a solid general contract in general conditions. You can go and reach out to GCS that have done work for you in the past and ask them if they could draft something up for you. Usually, they'll do that pro bono. Sometimes they'll require a little bit of cost. But you can just do that as an advisory. And then you can have that general conditions. Language be right there obviously require bonds. Obviously, all the the basic stuff remains, project meetings, scheduled project meetings, a project plan, project deadlines, scopes, milestones, all the basic fundamental project management 101. You do necessarily, also have to concern yourself with costs and payments. And you also have to look at the RFI and RFC process and how you're going to handle change orders and overruns. How can I build a VA s standard? I also thought we did an episode on this. I'm going to check. And if so I will post that in the show notes at podcast at smart Billings Academy comm for slash 244. That being said, how I like to approach a BA standard. This is gonna sound really bad, copy.

Phil Zito 22:14
Serious. There's a lot of really good standards out there. Well, I do not in any way encourage you to blatantly plagiarize someone's work. There's only so many ways to skin a cat. And so look at how go go onto Google do building automation, standard, file type colon PDF, site, colon, edu or site, colon. gov and look at how the government and schools which are large campuses are putting together their VA s standards. What are they emphasizing? What are the categories they're focused on? What are they going and digging into? And what are they excluding? And then based on that, that should give you a list of what documents you need to create. That should give you a list of what document or what standards you want to create what should be important to you what shouldn't if you're still struggling with that, I encourage you to check out our VA s standards boot camp. And that course opens up occasionally because it's a live course where we work through standards together. But I will provide a link to that and then you can get on the waitlist for when that opens up. What is the most important area for me to spend money on my BA s? That's a good question. So whenever I look at spending money on a BA s

Phil Zito 23:37
are we talking construction? Are we talking operations? If we're talking construction, I really liked commissioning, a good commissioning agent will pay for itself really well. Graphics are really great area to spend money on because that's what you interface with all the time going and having a really solid standard, that's a good place to spend money. You'll notice I don't really talk about product because the reality is the majority of the products are the same. At the end of the day. It's who's installing it, who's programming it, who's supporting it, and what standard are they being held accountable to. So if I'm going to spend money, it's going to be upfront on my standard, especially if I'm going to build multiple buildings. If you're only building one building, you don't need a standard and then commissioning. You know, if you're a commercial office building, you don't need commissioning. But if you are, you know campus or if you're a critical facility, you definitely should have commissioning. How do you balance comfort with energy efficiency? In the US you don't because energy is so cheap. I know that flies totally in the face of all this sustainability stuff that's going on right now and how the world's gonna end in five years or whatever they're saying. I mean, it changes every day. The reality is energy is cheap, and there's no purpose to have Building if you can't actually get people in the building, the reality is with comfort, that should be your primary focus. It should be life safety, comfort, energy efficiency. I know, I know that like flies in the face of all the stuff out there. And I'm probably going to get some hate for that. But at the end of the day, if you can't get people in your building, and no one wants to be there, you're not going to have a building. So energy efficiency is going to take care of itself, because no one's going to be in the building. So I mean, let's just be real. But I mean, if I was in a situation where I had a corporate sustainability goal, or maybe I was in California with, you know, title 24, and I was being forced into energy efficiency measures, maybe New York, where they're pushing that out, how do I balance comfort, I talked about this in my space can control live stream last night, which is you can get away you can cheat with airflow. So you can have airflow that maybe is a little warmer than normal. But if you're keeping the humidity level at the right point, and you're getting that evaporative effect across people, you can make 76 degrees feel comfortable. So when I look at comfort and energy efficiency, I look at a couple different things. How do I manage demand with how I stage on my systems? And how I load my systems? How do I manage efficiency? Do I use partial load systems? Or do I use variable load systems? So like a partial load chiller would be a smaller chiller, but maybe it doesn't have variable load because it doesn't have a variable compressor. So how do I take advantage of that? How can I use sliding scales of set points? How can I adjust my spaces to pre load based on potential thermal loads? How can I look and tie my building automation system into occupancy data and then adjust my loading based on that? How can I give the perception of control to make people feel more comfortable, you can squeeze a good two to four degrees of comfort out of people if they perceive that they have control of the environment, even if they're controlling nothing? That's just a reality. It's a little trick, you know, we used to go and give people on making air quotes control of the thermostat when it actually wouldn't do anything. And that made them feel like they were more comfortable. Should customers know how to program there be a yes. I mean, it depends. It really depends on what you're trying to do. Once again, if you're a self sufficient campus, or you're self sufficient facility, and you want to remain self sufficient? Yeah, definitely, it really helps if you do a lot of tenant finish out, you do a lot of changes that will help as well. So there's a variety of things that will really help you in regards to programming, your VA s. That being said, if you're not really going to ever change anything, you have no desire to self support or self troubleshoot, then really, there's no reason for you to start learning to program your BS. What are the most common troubleshooting issues this is also something I talked about. So I will add that live stream live stream reference that I talked about in last night's live stream which by the way, if you do not attend our SBA TV lives at 8pm, Central Time on Monday nights, and I think 11 Central am on Wednesdays, if I remember correctly, those

Phil Zito 28:27
are great. It's a time for you and I to go through discuss a topic right now we're going through hv AC sequencing, and we talk about a topic in great detail. And I answer any questions you got. But what are the most common troubleshooting issues space control, space control, primarily airflow, most of your issues, you're going to get our space control related issues. So if you learn how spaces perform, you'll solve a lot of your issues also, I mean, you get the basic it and protocol issues. But those are usually setting issues. Those aren't system failures. Those are usually someone hosing up a setting. But the most common issue I run into is space control not getting enough airflow or not getting the proper temperature within the space. How do I budget for VA s projects will probably turn in this into another podcast. So budgeting podcast, but there's three main models right there is the point. So cost per point, cost per square foot and cost per system. So you got to pick a model that works for you. I tend to like the cost per system model it tends to work well because point density is all over the place. And square foot does not necessarily apply because you can have a warehouse that has tons of square footage but very few systems. So I like to look at a cost per system for my initial budget. And then obviously if you are working in a kitchen medical facility you have to go in factor for that, like jails, I'll do 1.5 multiplier because of the fact that everything is like 150% longer just to move around in a jail. So I'll do a budgeting podcast though in the future, how to avoid being locked into a single contractor, it's all in the spec, my friend, go and ask for a copy of all Program Files, all database files, make sure you have the engineering tools, and that you have a user account with admin rights and full access to the system. You specify those things and you validate that you've received those things, and you should not be locked in anymore. Now you may have to go and specify that you have a multi year contract for the licensing of the software with the option to repurchase directly at a given rate. And that will make sure that the you know software doesn't expire in a year, and then you're dependent once again on the contractor. But if you do that, along with, you know the tools and the files, you should be able to bring in any other contractor to come work on the system, they may have a little bit of a learning curve. But overall, you'll have that another thing I might add is any of the tech pubs that you require in order to use the software. Alright, our final question, should I integrate multiple systems into a single pane of glass? No, no, please, for the love of god don't do this. I see so many people who I they just don't know their head from their ass. And they recommend this. I don't know why they recommend it. But it's the stupidest thing that ever came into our industry is the single pane of glass concept. Okay, I've got an operator who's a mechanic, and I'm gonna overwhelm him with AV and access control and lighting data and like parking telemetry systems, like no, no, thank you. This person is barely keeping up with the 30,000 unacknowledged alarms, and you're gonna put all this other crap and garbage onto the UI for them. No, no. And don't tell me that your UI handles this issue. And so it's okay, no, just don't just have, yes, I know, it looks stupid to walk into a control room and have 20 monitors, there's an easy fix for that. It's called an AV switcher. And you just get a switcher, and you can have a single monitor and switch from multiple sources. So you can do that. So you don't have to have 20 monitors. But the reality is, you have a system and a UI for the functional area that the person operating it is going to cover. And I have yet I don't see I've yet I have met people who can handle all the different systems. It's very few and far between people who can handle all these systems and do it effectively. Even if they have the technical accuracy to do it and the ability to do it. They don't have the freaking time to do it. There's a reason why when the industrial revolution happened, and we started building, kind of conveyor belt and process lines that we adopted that model. There's a reason why a lot of the really large controls companies work in that model. They have a technician, they have a designer, they have a programmer, and they have specific roles to execute specific tasks, you should really team your facilities team like that as well. You have an electrician, you have a mechanic, you have someone who specializes on the AV, someone who specializes on the lighting.

Phil Zito 33:27
Now granted, I realized some of you have smaller campuses, and it doesn't make sense to have someone who's an expert in all of this, but I'm talking large environments, you should be able to man, those things if you don't want to be dependent on contractors, but please, for the love of God. Avoid a single pane of glass their garbage, you really shouldn't use them. I know I'm gonna get flamed about this as well. It's kind of like when I went off on back net sc and I got all these people telling me how wrong I was. That's fine. It's totally fine. You don't have to agree with me. Please challenge me. Don't believe me. Don't listen to me. Do what you want. But I'm telling you, I've never seen these things work well. And I know someone's going to email me and say, well, Phil, at this building, we do it great. And you know what? That's awesome. Good for you. I'm super excited for you slow clap. But the reality is that the majority of people just can't execute that and it's a waste of money that could be put elsewhere for something much more valuable. All right. So hey, Thanks a ton for being here. It's awesome talking to you all like always. I look forward to hearing from you again. Keep these questions coming in marketing at smart buildings Academy comm if you're at all interested in our courses, definitely go check those out. You can use the coupon code tax day, ta x DAY so that's Tango, alpha x ray, delta, alpha Yankee. Use that on checkout. You can get 20% off any of our courses. Thanks so much. I'll see you again next week where I believe we'll be talking about lighting. So thanks a ton and take care

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Phil Zito 0:00
This is the smart buildings Academy podcast with Phil Zito Episode 244 Hey folks, Phil Zito here and welcome to Episode 244 of the smart buildings Academy podcast. And in this episode we are going to be continuing our Ask me anything series on buying a building automation system. So thank you to all of you who have been sending in your questions. We stood up another email address you can now send in questions to marketing at smart buildings Academy comm once again that is marketing at smart buildings Academy comm that's where you can send your questions related to the podcast because we've been getting a lot of them and I want to make sure they kind of go to a single place so that we get them answered. Everything we discussed today can be found at podcasts at smart buildings Academy comm forward slash 244. Once again, that's podcast at smart buildings academy.com forward slash 244. A couple things to update you on real quick before we dive into today's episode. First off, if you've been looking at buying one of our courses, our Tax Day Sale is still going on until the 15th of April. And that enables you to take 20% off any of our courses with the coupon code tax day. That's one word ta XDA. Why use that at checkout, I'll take 20% off the cost of your courses. Also, we have been working daily on our building automation acronym guide. So you'll see that linked in the notes at podcast at smart buildings Academy comm for slash 244 I encourage you to read through that continue to provide us feedback at marketing at smart buildings academy.com let us know what we can add to that guide. My vision for this is to be adding videos and text definitions and blog posts daily for at least the next 365 days to this guide, it's completely free. There's no opt in and should become a great resource to our industry for folks looking just for fundamental knowledge. Finally, we also are rolling out several new courses, our building automation basics just rolled out, we're going to be rolling out in IQ strategies for building automation for those of you reopening your buildings, we're gonna be rolling out a touchless strategies for building automation, how to use building automation systems to create a touchless experience. And we are going to be going and rolling out our workforce development program in the very near future. Okay, with all of that out of the way, let's dive in to 17 questions this time about buying a building automation system. Once again, as I mentioned, you can go to marketing at smart buildings academy.com to submit your questions, and we will answer them in future episodes. So what is a cloud hosted va? s? This question came into us a couple of weeks ago actually, we just didn't get a chance to get to it. And it's a great question. Because you see, at least on LinkedIn, a lot of messaging around VA s as a Service Cloud hosted VA s and I've heard several of our customers come to us on the owner operator side and say that they were considering getting a cloud hosted VA s so what is it? Well, I'll tell you what it's not at least as of right now what it's not. And that is it's not a complete building automation system hosted in the cloud, you still have physical controllers, as far as I can see on the majority of the systems out there, you still have supervisory devices. It is largely the server capabilities that are cloud hosted. So what I want to talk about is basically what is the cloud? How is B as hosted on the cloud? And then what do you need to consider as someone potentially buying, selecting or scoping a building automation system? Well, the cloud quite simply as someone else's data center, that's all it is. If you have a data center and one of your buildings, think about this massive data center, kind of in, you know, Virginia, in Oregon, wherever here in Wisconsin, we have one down in, I think it's Northbrook, Illinois. And these data centers are filled with computers. And these computers basically act as timeshares. Right, you can rent part of the computer or all of the computer for a certain amount of time, usually at a monthly cost. Well, what these building automation providers are doing is they're taking their server capabilities, their analytics capabilities, a bunch of their more advanced higher level capabilities, and they're placing them in the cloud. It's easier for them to manage upgrades and see easier for them to manage versioning. And they go and charge you a reoccurring cost instead of a capital cost. Now, what a cloud hosted VA S is not it is not replacing supervisory devices as of yet. And definitely not replacing controllers and i O, I've seen some folks message around that that's not happening. So is a cloud hosted be as good for you? Well, potentially, if you have one site, and you want some of that server capability, but you don't want the server, then it may be good for you to go and cloud host your BBs and connect that supervisory device into that cloud service. And the reason I say that is because you're paying a predictable monthly cost, that's an operational cost that you can usually shed pretty easy, rather than a capital cost. And you don't need to maintain those IT assets, which is difficult for smaller buildings. If you're a medium sized business, I don't really find cloud hosted bi s to be very practical for you. So now, that being said, if you are a large business, I find that cloud has to be as can be practical for you. But it can also not be practical for you at the same time. If you're going after a cloud VA s because you want the analytics, you want the always updated software, you want all of that, and you're not a critical environment, then cloud has to be as probably pretty good for you. If you're like a hospital or a data center or something, I would recommend keeping stuff on prem, which means keeping it in your data center. Alright, how should I change my VA s post COVID? Well, this is actually a course that we're going to be coming up with around IAA Q and B, A S. But let's cover kind of the highlights of this. Because this is a very pertinent question. First thing around VA S is going in and analyzing that everything is online. basically doing a site audit before you can go and make any sequence changes whether you know you adopt ashtrays recommendations, or the CDC recommendations or whoever's recommendations, you first need to make sure everything is working. So step one, is go and analyze your system. Understand that everything's online and everything's functioning. Step two, analyze your capacity, a lot of the IQ recommendations tie to increased ventilation. And with that increased ventilation, and that kind of wider range on humidity, you are going to have potential capacity issues, especially during design day scenarios. So understand those potential capacity impacts. And what that means to your business. Do you need to upsize your plant? Do you need to maybe raise your setpoint a little, I can't tell you what that would be, that's going to be a case by case basis, it's something we'll dive deep into in our IQ course. But that being said, What I can tell you is that if you look at your system, and if it's already over capacity, right now, we're not even in design day conditions, you're struggling, then when you start to introduce enhanced ventilation, so greater outdoor air, greater air changes, greater air velocity, your capacity is most likely not going to be able to keep up and so you got to make a decision is comfort your primary priority, which I mean, that's a struggle, right, you can go and do the increased ventilation, you can bring in more outside air that you have to condition, but then maybe you're not providing the comfort level. And we are trying to get tenants to come back in the building. So it's a delicate balance of Am I going to increase ventilation to potentially make the air healthier? Am I going to just introduce ionization and UV and call it a day? Or am I going to just accept that I don't have system capacity. And I'm going to focus on comfort because if people aren't comfortable, they're not just going to keep coming into a building that they don't have to necessarily come into. So you've got that aspect. And then there's the dashboarding aspect of things, right? Can you pull data out of your building automation system to make the data visible? And can you parse that data in such a way that it actually makes logical sense to an untrained observer so that an occupant could walk in a building and go, Oh, I understand what this dashboard means. It means my buildings healthy, maybe it's like a green, yellow, red dashboard. Whatever you do, don't like start putting, you know, Pascal's of pressure or whatever on a dashboard and expect people to understand what the heck they're looking at. It's not going to make a lot of sense to them. You got to remember the audience and whatever you do, can I implement touchless ba s and temperature control how? Yeah, I mean, you certainly can it depends on the building automation system. The majority of building automation system dums do support mobile interfaces, you don't necessarily have to go buy a solution like comfy or whatever other solutions out there these days that is focused on occupant control and occupant feedback, you can definitely work with your provider. And most of them have a mobile friendly interface The challenge with mobile friendly interfaces, that kind of comfy addresses, I don't think comfy addresses the you I don't think the UI is necessarily the problem, although they would argue that that's part of the problem. The biggest problem, I see that these third party solution providers address is user management. That's the biggest challenge is having users being able to access the system and be able to go and change temperatures. And then how do you manage which user has priority. So there's a couple ways you can do this, you can use a third party, device and software provider, right. And that can be a formal software provider like a comfy, right. Or it can be a informal software provider, like a developer who simply pulls via the API data out of your building automation system, and puts it into a graphical front end, I think there's a real opportunity, just for those of you listening who are product providers, for people to consume data from building automation systems via BACnet interfaces. And to feed that into pretty looking graphical interfaces. And to manage that user layer. There's going to be a lot of people who want touchless tamp control, touchless, lighting, control, touchless conveyance control, so that's elevators. And those are like the three big things, right? Also touchless access control. So those would be like the four big things, temperature, lighting, conveyance and access control. And if you can manage those kind of four things, you're going to remove a lot of touching within the space, which I mean, I'm not going to get into whether that works or doesn't work. But it is something that is definitely Top of Mind on a lot of people's minds as they reoccupy buildings. So think through that, how can I get my operators to use analytics? This is an age old question, right? There's been two barriers to adoption of analytics one has been the cost, right? You go. And you have to normalize all the data, you have to map in all the data, you have to get the data into the system. And that still to this day is pretty resource intensive, especially with legacy systems, and in my opinion, is one of the biggest barriers to adoption of analytics is that first cost implementation. Now the second barrier to analytics, which we you know, we really have to be cognizant of, is getting people to actually use the analytics. So there's kind of three issues that I've seen, having sold analytics in the past, having deployed analytics in the past and training people. What I've seen is the three barriers to analytics is first cultural, right? Do you even have a culture of maintenance? Do you have a culture of avoidance or a culture of maintenance, if you have a culture of avoidance, people are going to avoid analytics like the plague, because it's going to show that they're not doing their job. And that's going to be very scary. I've heard that firsthand from a lot of people who are like, it's just going to show that my people aren't doing their jobs, or it's going to make them overwhelmed. So do you have a culture of avoidance or a culture of maintenance? The second thing would be Do you even have the aptitude to interpret the results? And this varies based on analytic solution, some analytic solutions provide great guidance on whether or not you need to do something. And others are, you know, really meant for data scientists and operators should not be looking at them because they don't make any sense. And then the third thing is, Do you even have the capabilities to execute what the analytics are pointing out? So let's assume you have the culture, right? The culture is very proactive, your maintenance focused, you've got a good maintenance program, you have people who can reasonably understand hv AC sequences, they can reasonably understand what the analytics is saying. But do you have the resources both in technical capability as well as in monetary ability to go and reconcile the issues that the analytics are pointing out? Now, to this point, I've been largely talking about fault detection analytics. I should clarify that in the beginning. There are regression based analytics and those are analytics that look at past data sets. They compare them to you know, in environmental variables, etc. to do both projections of cost as well as utilization. Those analytics are a little bit easier to use. In my opinion, they're less immediately impactful, they're better for strategy. And for making investment decisions, like, Hey, we can see where we're wasting. And we can make an investment decision based on a potential ROI based on the data. But they're less effective for actual maintenance. So just want to be clear on that. Should I get a VA s or just use smart equipment, smart equipment is really interesting. So for those of you who have not been in the industry for a long time, we've done this weird kind of cyclical pattern, where we started off with application specific controls. So that was kind of the first big thing with DDC direct digital controls, were they were application specific, you'd flip some DIP switches, do some QA Question and Answer selection, and you will get a program but you had no real ability to program it, then came out freely programmable controllers. And this was really cool, the engineers could write whatever sequence they wanted, everything was all well and good. But then we started to go back to the application specific controllers in the form of smart equipment, where you have this equipment that shipped with application specific controllers on it, as well as kind of analytics built into the cloud. And you're able to then go and analyze this data, right? So with this with this capability of smart buildings, and with this capability of smart equipment, rather, you are now able to put a building automation system in without a building automation system. So if you're in a light commercial environment, if you're in an office space environment, smart equipment may be the path you want, in lieu of building automation system. How important are mobile friendly graphics? It just depends. So what depends on how important mobile friendly graphics are is one, once again, your culture are people actually going to use them to does it fit into your troubleshooting and maintenance process. If you primarily have a dispatch model, where people have Central Dispatch, that triage is like level one triage, and then dispatches level two to go work on stuff. mobile friendly graphics may not be as important. But if you have a very mobile facility team, and they are constantly on the move, then mobile friendly graphics may be important. But you also have to have the infrastructure to support this. If you're building automation system data is not available through the wireless network on your sites, and is only available through like a hardwire connection to a client that's sitting in the facilities office, then mobile friendly graphics really aren't going to do much. How do I determine what level of cybersecurity I should have? We've done an episode on this. So I'm going to refer to this episode in the show notes. I'm just going to actually make a note, refer to cyber episode. But basically, whenever you're approaching cybersecurity, it's an analysis of the likelihood of the risk, how much the risk would impact you. And then based on how much the risk would impact you, in dollars, times the likelihood of the risk.

Phil Zito 18:19
That equals the amount of money you should spend on cybersecurity. I will tell you, I'm not a doom and gloom cybersecurity guy. I know there's a lot of companies out there that make quite a bit of money on you believing that you need to have you know, Pentagon level cybersecurity for your office building. That's not the case. Really even worst case, someone hacks in and gets into your building automation system, and they turn down the temperature in your building doesn't really do much to an office building. As far as profitability loss. Yeah, the tenants may be unhappy for a little bit, but it's completely different than like a hospital or lab or a data center, where you definitely should invest in cybersecurity, because business continuity can be threatened by environmental issues. Should I have multiple systems on my campus? Why or why not? It really depends if you're not going to self maintain, and you are not going to have a strong facility group. Then whether you have multiple systems or a single system, it just comes down to a procurement conversation. And are there vendors my rule of thumb with any any system is are there multiple vendors that can service that system? So I highly suggest you don't buy a no name brand building automation system just because it's low bid, because you'll really struggle to find people to service it. That being said, if you have a solid facility team that I recommend you stick with a single brand and here's why. Or at least have a really solid VA s standard. Because if you train your team on a single solution, and you have a strong standard so that every building New looks relatively the same, even if they have different pieces of equipment, the point names are the same, the interfaces look the same, then you only have to train once, and it makes it much easier. And it will reduce a lot of cost from a maintenance perspective. That being said, if you have no desire to maintain your buildings, and you're really just kind of winging it, and you just got some glorified, you know, janitors that you call mechanics, then in that case, yeah, go and bid low bid to your heart's content, just make sure that there's plenty of contractors to service, whatever low bid system you select. I'm not opposed to low bid. I just, it's right in the right scenario when it's wrong in the wrong scenario. Alright, how do I manage contractors? If I do owner direct work? Great question. So the first thing you need to do is have a solid general contract in general conditions. You can go and reach out to GCS that have done work for you in the past and ask them if they could draft something up for you. Usually, they'll do that pro bono. Sometimes they'll require a little bit of cost. But you can just do that as an advisory. And then you can have that general conditions. Language be right there obviously require bonds. Obviously, all the the basic stuff remains, project meetings, scheduled project meetings, a project plan, project deadlines, scopes, milestones, all the basic fundamental project management 101. You do necessarily, also have to concern yourself with costs and payments. And you also have to look at the RFI and RFC process and how you're going to handle change orders and overruns. How can I build a VA s standard? I also thought we did an episode on this. I'm going to check. And if so I will post that in the show notes at podcast at smart Billings Academy comm for slash 244. That being said, how I like to approach a BA standard. This is gonna sound really bad, copy.

Phil Zito 22:14
Serious. There's a lot of really good standards out there. Well, I do not in any way encourage you to blatantly plagiarize someone's work. There's only so many ways to skin a cat. And so look at how go go onto Google do building automation, standard, file type colon PDF, site, colon, edu or site, colon. gov and look at how the government and schools which are large campuses are putting together their VA s standards. What are they emphasizing? What are the categories they're focused on? What are they going and digging into? And what are they excluding? And then based on that, that should give you a list of what documents you need to create. That should give you a list of what document or what standards you want to create what should be important to you what shouldn't if you're still struggling with that, I encourage you to check out our VA s standards boot camp. And that course opens up occasionally because it's a live course where we work through standards together. But I will provide a link to that and then you can get on the waitlist for when that opens up. What is the most important area for me to spend money on my BA s? That's a good question. So whenever I look at spending money on a BA s

Phil Zito 23:37
are we talking construction? Are we talking operations? If we're talking construction, I really liked commissioning, a good commissioning agent will pay for itself really well. Graphics are really great area to spend money on because that's what you interface with all the time going and having a really solid standard, that's a good place to spend money. You'll notice I don't really talk about product because the reality is the majority of the products are the same. At the end of the day. It's who's installing it, who's programming it, who's supporting it, and what standard are they being held accountable to. So if I'm going to spend money, it's going to be upfront on my standard, especially if I'm going to build multiple buildings. If you're only building one building, you don't need a standard and then commissioning. You know, if you're a commercial office building, you don't need commissioning. But if you are, you know campus or if you're a critical facility, you definitely should have commissioning. How do you balance comfort with energy efficiency? In the US you don't because energy is so cheap. I know that flies totally in the face of all this sustainability stuff that's going on right now and how the world's gonna end in five years or whatever they're saying. I mean, it changes every day. The reality is energy is cheap, and there's no purpose to have Building if you can't actually get people in the building, the reality is with comfort, that should be your primary focus. It should be life safety, comfort, energy efficiency. I know, I know that like flies in the face of all the stuff out there. And I'm probably going to get some hate for that. But at the end of the day, if you can't get people in your building, and no one wants to be there, you're not going to have a building. So energy efficiency is going to take care of itself, because no one's going to be in the building. So I mean, let's just be real. But I mean, if I was in a situation where I had a corporate sustainability goal, or maybe I was in California with, you know, title 24, and I was being forced into energy efficiency measures, maybe New York, where they're pushing that out, how do I balance comfort, I talked about this in my space can control live stream last night, which is you can get away you can cheat with airflow. So you can have airflow that maybe is a little warmer than normal. But if you're keeping the humidity level at the right point, and you're getting that evaporative effect across people, you can make 76 degrees feel comfortable. So when I look at comfort and energy efficiency, I look at a couple different things. How do I manage demand with how I stage on my systems? And how I load my systems? How do I manage efficiency? Do I use partial load systems? Or do I use variable load systems? So like a partial load chiller would be a smaller chiller, but maybe it doesn't have variable load because it doesn't have a variable compressor. So how do I take advantage of that? How can I use sliding scales of set points? How can I adjust my spaces to pre load based on potential thermal loads? How can I look and tie my building automation system into occupancy data and then adjust my loading based on that? How can I give the perception of control to make people feel more comfortable, you can squeeze a good two to four degrees of comfort out of people if they perceive that they have control of the environment, even if they're controlling nothing? That's just a reality. It's a little trick, you know, we used to go and give people on making air quotes control of the thermostat when it actually wouldn't do anything. And that made them feel like they were more comfortable. Should customers know how to program there be a yes. I mean, it depends. It really depends on what you're trying to do. Once again, if you're a self sufficient campus, or you're self sufficient facility, and you want to remain self sufficient? Yeah, definitely, it really helps if you do a lot of tenant finish out, you do a lot of changes that will help as well. So there's a variety of things that will really help you in regards to programming, your VA s. That being said, if you're not really going to ever change anything, you have no desire to self support or self troubleshoot, then really, there's no reason for you to start learning to program your BS. What are the most common troubleshooting issues this is also something I talked about. So I will add that live stream live stream reference that I talked about in last night's live stream which by the way, if you do not attend our SBA TV lives at 8pm, Central Time on Monday nights, and I think 11 Central am on Wednesdays, if I remember correctly, those

Phil Zito 28:27
are great. It's a time for you and I to go through discuss a topic right now we're going through hv AC sequencing, and we talk about a topic in great detail. And I answer any questions you got. But what are the most common troubleshooting issues space control, space control, primarily airflow, most of your issues, you're going to get our space control related issues. So if you learn how spaces perform, you'll solve a lot of your issues also, I mean, you get the basic it and protocol issues. But those are usually setting issues. Those aren't system failures. Those are usually someone hosing up a setting. But the most common issue I run into is space control not getting enough airflow or not getting the proper temperature within the space. How do I budget for VA s projects will probably turn in this into another podcast. So budgeting podcast, but there's three main models right there is the point. So cost per point, cost per square foot and cost per system. So you got to pick a model that works for you. I tend to like the cost per system model it tends to work well because point density is all over the place. And square foot does not necessarily apply because you can have a warehouse that has tons of square footage but very few systems. So I like to look at a cost per system for my initial budget. And then obviously if you are working in a kitchen medical facility you have to go in factor for that, like jails, I'll do 1.5 multiplier because of the fact that everything is like 150% longer just to move around in a jail. So I'll do a budgeting podcast though in the future, how to avoid being locked into a single contractor, it's all in the spec, my friend, go and ask for a copy of all Program Files, all database files, make sure you have the engineering tools, and that you have a user account with admin rights and full access to the system. You specify those things and you validate that you've received those things, and you should not be locked in anymore. Now you may have to go and specify that you have a multi year contract for the licensing of the software with the option to repurchase directly at a given rate. And that will make sure that the you know software doesn't expire in a year, and then you're dependent once again on the contractor. But if you do that, along with, you know the tools and the files, you should be able to bring in any other contractor to come work on the system, they may have a little bit of a learning curve. But overall, you'll have that another thing I might add is any of the tech pubs that you require in order to use the software. Alright, our final question, should I integrate multiple systems into a single pane of glass? No, no, please, for the love of god don't do this. I see so many people who I they just don't know their head from their ass. And they recommend this. I don't know why they recommend it. But it's the stupidest thing that ever came into our industry is the single pane of glass concept. Okay, I've got an operator who's a mechanic, and I'm gonna overwhelm him with AV and access control and lighting data and like parking telemetry systems, like no, no, thank you. This person is barely keeping up with the 30,000 unacknowledged alarms, and you're gonna put all this other crap and garbage onto the UI for them. No, no. And don't tell me that your UI handles this issue. And so it's okay, no, just don't just have, yes, I know, it looks stupid to walk into a control room and have 20 monitors, there's an easy fix for that. It's called an AV switcher. And you just get a switcher, and you can have a single monitor and switch from multiple sources. So you can do that. So you don't have to have 20 monitors. But the reality is, you have a system and a UI for the functional area that the person operating it is going to cover. And I have yet I don't see I've yet I have met people who can handle all the different systems. It's very few and far between people who can handle all these systems and do it effectively. Even if they have the technical accuracy to do it and the ability to do it. They don't have the freaking time to do it. There's a reason why when the industrial revolution happened, and we started building, kind of conveyor belt and process lines that we adopted that model. There's a reason why a lot of the really large controls companies work in that model. They have a technician, they have a designer, they have a programmer, and they have specific roles to execute specific tasks, you should really team your facilities team like that as well. You have an electrician, you have a mechanic, you have someone who specializes on the AV, someone who specializes on the lighting.

Phil Zito 33:27
Now granted, I realized some of you have smaller campuses, and it doesn't make sense to have someone who's an expert in all of this, but I'm talking large environments, you should be able to man, those things if you don't want to be dependent on contractors, but please, for the love of God. Avoid a single pane of glass their garbage, you really shouldn't use them. I know I'm gonna get flamed about this as well. It's kind of like when I went off on back net sc and I got all these people telling me how wrong I was. That's fine. It's totally fine. You don't have to agree with me. Please challenge me. Don't believe me. Don't listen to me. Do what you want. But I'm telling you, I've never seen these things work well. And I know someone's going to email me and say, well, Phil, at this building, we do it great. And you know what? That's awesome. Good for you. I'm super excited for you slow clap. But the reality is that the majority of people just can't execute that and it's a waste of money that could be put elsewhere for something much more valuable. All right. So hey, Thanks a ton for being here. It's awesome talking to you all like always. I look forward to hearing from you again. Keep these questions coming in marketing at smart buildings Academy comm if you're at all interested in our courses, definitely go check those out. You can use the coupon code tax day, ta x DAY so that's Tango, alpha x ray, delta, alpha Yankee. Use that on checkout. You can get 20% off any of our courses. Thanks so much. I'll see you again next week where I believe we'll be talking about lighting. So thanks a ton and take care

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Phil Zito

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