2024 Smart Building Practical Guide: Save Money, Avoid Pitfalls, And Pay Back In 3 Years

Since the second half of 2023, I have noticed a significant change in the owners and developers who come to me for consultation. Previously they asked about "what kind of black technology can be stored in smart buildings", but now they ask about "when will the investment be paid back", "how to renovate old buildings" and "whether employees are willing to use it". Smart buildings in 2024 have transformed from display items to practical items. This article does not talk about concepts, but only describes the logic, pitfalls, and operations that can be directly copied this year.

How smart buildings save money

Last year, we carried out renovation work on an office building with an area of ​​50,000 square meters in Shanghai. What we did at first was not to install sensors, but to extract the electricity bills of the property within three years and extract the data. We found that no one was paying attention to the start and stop time of the air conditioning box to control it, and it continued to operate at full speed after 8 p.m. The first step in the intelligence process is always to discover the waste phenomenon, rather than blindly piling up hardware facilities.

Most of the companies that consulted me this year will limit the investment return cycle to within three years. Projects that can achieve this situation almost all start from the three most traditional aspects of energy consumption: HVAC control, lighting strategy, and demand electricity management. Experience functions such as facial recognition and meeting room reservations are at the back of the list. Can.

Difficulties in smart building renovation

The difficulty is not in the technical aspect, but in the disapproval attitude of the old masters in the property engineering department. There was a shopping mall project last year. The newly installed automatic control system was switched directly to manual mode by the master. The reason given was that "the automatic temperature adjustment seemed too slow, and the merchants complained about this." We then spent two weeks working with him to debug the parameters and change the logic to a rhythm that suited him, so that the system actually started to run normally.

Another common problem is the difficulty of wiring. In 2024, if you still blindly require an all-wired deployment solution, it will basically be rejected. The mainstream choice for current renovation projects is wireless sensors and edge computing gateways. Although data refresh will be slower by a few seconds, the construction period can be compressed from three months to two weeks, and the overall cost is reduced by more than 40%.

2024 new regulations for smart buildings

This year, both Shanghai and Shenzhen have issued new guidelines that require all new buildings invested by the government to reserve intelligent interfaces. When it comes to drawings, you need to consider in advance the installation location of future sensors and the direction of the wire trough. Many design institutes still draw drawings according to the standards of ten years ago. In the end, they need to make additional bright lines during acceptance. The result is not beautiful and expensive.

Another point that is easily overlooked is carbon emission accounting. Some pilot buildings in Beijing have begun to require real-time energy consumption data to be used to reversely deduce carbon emissions, rather than relying on formulas for estimation. This shows that the electricity meter and heat meter data collected by the building automation system must be connected to the government platform, and it is no longer feasible to rely solely on quarterly meter readings.

Should I choose hardware or platform for smart buildings?

The advice I give is: If the budget can only be used to buy one item, then you should first buy a stable controller and meter, not a large-screen visualization platform. This year, two customers spent hundreds of thousands to build beautiful large central control screens. However, in the end, the underlying data collection points were not complete, so that the large screens could only play demonstration animations and could not be used in actual applications.

In contrast, projects that put money into things like sensors, electric valves, and trusty PLCs fared better. The platform can be iterated year by year. However, if the automation of the physical layer of the building is not done well, the cost of making up for it in the future will be extremely huge. This year, the sales rhetoric of many IoT platforms has changed. They no longer emphasize how cool SaaS is, but focus on how strong hardware compatibility is.

How to use smart building data

The best customers use it not to use data to carry out predictive maintenance, but to negotiate tenant renewals. There is a landlord in Beijing who generates monthly reports on data such as tenants' time-sharing electricity consumption and overtime air-conditioning usage hours. When renewing the contract, he directly informed the tenants: Your per capita energy consumption last year was the lowest among the same business district. This shows that your employees are happy here. This changes it from a cost item to an asset item.

The second step is to carry out related operations of workstations and space reuse. After the epidemic is over, many companies have chosen to shrink their office space, but their lease contracts have not yet expired. The plan we have developed for these companies is to connect conference rooms and idle workstations to the time-sharing booking system, and then provide them to freelancers in the form of short-term rentals. This system is not complicated. Its core point is to unbind access control permissions and conference tablets, and generate visitor QR codes by the hour.

Intelligent building trends in the next three years

Beginning in 2024, the market size of existing renovation projects will exceed that of new projects for the first time, which will have a great impact on product selection: wireless sensors that do not need to break ground again and do not require long downtime will become mainstream. Battery-powered equipment that was considered unreliable in the past can now be used without battery replacement for five years.

There is another trend, which is operation and maintenance outsourcing. Buildings are becoming more and more complex, and it is difficult for the property management company itself to afford a composite team that understands BA (building automation), understands the network, and understands the cloud platform. This year, we have seen several leading property management companies package their automatic control systems, hand them over to third parties for hosting, and share them according to the energy-saving benefits. Once this model operates smoothly, the popularity of smart buildings will accelerate.

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For colleagues or owners who read this, I would like to ask you this question: In the project or company you are in, is the biggest obstacle to promoting intelligence coming from budget approval, or from the lack of cooperation of the user department? You are welcome to communicate in the comment area, and you are also welcome to forward it to your friends who are in a state of confusion about whether to carry out intelligent transformation.