Clients ready to take control

B&ES, BCIA, BEMS, BMS, controls
Embracing controls — Sue Sharp

Building owners and managers are only scratching the surface of what their control systems can achieve, says B&ES president Sue Sharp.

Building control systems are often blamed when a building fails to meet its performance targets for energy efficiency and comfort. Yet, it is those very same controls that hold the key to delivering better long-term outcomes for building owners and operators.

The building-services industry needs to do more to impress on commercial building clients the benefits of controls technology and the importance of using them to their full potential. Properly specified, installed and commissioned controls or full building energy management system (BEMS) can act as the ‘heart’ of a building and provide the tools needed to achieve running-cost savings and meet legislative requirements. Too often they are never given the chance.

At the recent Building Controls Industry Association (BCIA) conference, which was supported by B&ES, the over-riding message was ‘Meter, monitor and manage’ to improve energy efficiency.

BCIA president Ian Ellis told the conference that the controls sector had an increasingly important financial role to play: ‘We need to make buildings perform as designed because rising costs and legislation is making this crucial,’ he said.

Potential

He urged the building engineering services sector to make better use of the potential within building energy management systems (BEMS) – many of which are installed, but not properly used — and to deliver information that is ‘meaningful to the end client…and delivered in a way that is useful’.

Integrating the future

Incoming President Bruce Bisset explains the evolving role of the Building & Engineering Services Association (B&ES).

Just 16 months since the membership voted overwhelmingly for a new identity, it is clear that B&ES is quickly evolving into the natural home for all specialists across building engineering services.

We are working hard to ensure that B&ES remains entirely fit for purpose against the backdrop of an ever-developing industry dealing with unprecedented economic turmoil, rapid technological advances, improved working practices and the emergence of the low-carbon economy.

Business today is not being done the way it was even five years ago — and won’t ever be done that way again. The association’s new identity reflects the scope of work we undertake in today’s complex construction processes, where B&ES members must be prepared to take a complete and multi-disciplinary view.

Building-engineering firms play a central role in the integration of renewable and low carbon technologies. This means we have to develop even closer and more positive relationships with sister organisations that represent the disciplines with which we interact — including manufacturers, consulting engineers, end users and clients.

B&ES and its members are seeking to enhance our role as leaders, innovators and integrators able to shape the built environment of the future.

Bruce Bisset will take over from Sue Sharp as President of the Building & Engineering Services Association (B&ES) on 11 July 2013.

The BCIA is championing the use of the BS EN 15232 standard as a guideline for using controls to improve energy efficiency and carry out payback calculations that ‘clearly demonstrate the value of installing a control system’.

However, simply installing a control system is never enough Does the building operator actually understand the system? Have the occupants had any training in how to use and program the controls? Parameters are often over-ridden during service and maintenance work and never put back to the correct values. The way buildings are used and configured also changes over time, but often the way heating and air-conditioning systems are controlled is not adjusted to reflect those changes.

Factors like these account for the criticism controls systems often unfairly receive when a building fails to deliver the energy savings promised at procurement stage. The knock-on effect can be that controls are ‘value engineered’ out of other new-build or refurbishment projects to cut upfront costs leading to even more performance problems.

The culture of value engineering and low-cost tendering is hugely detrimental to the industry’s efforts to improve energy efficiency.

Cutting out controls makes it very hard to deliver properly integrated solutions that allow separate building-services technologies to work in harmony — and also makes a building much harder to manage and maintain.

Integration is not just a convenient buzz-word to be tossed around indiscriminately whenever the issue of supply chain reform comes up. Rather, integration lies right at the heart of everything the industry should be aspiring to. Without providing properly integrated, well controlled solutions, we will not achieve the reductions needed to improve energy security and deal with rising fuel prices.

Encouragingly, there was evidence at the BCIA conference that commercial building clients are becoming increasingly aware of the value of exactly these well engineered building services.

Debbie Hobbs, head of sustainability at Legal & General Property, explained that her company has 10-year asset plans in place for each property looking at all aspects of sustainability linked to planned preventative maintenance ‘where we look for every opportunity to improve energy efficiency’.

‘We fundamentally believe that sustainability adds value to our property funds,’ said Debbie Hobbs. ‘If we see an E, F, or G rating on the Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) we have to consider whether we can address the problems before buying.’

Greenwash

However, she complained that there was too much ‘Greenwash’, with very little ‘follow through on the talk’, and that this had held back commercial property improvements.

Our industry’s task, therefore, is to focus on delivering solutions that will close the gap between predicted/promised performance and what actually happens during a building’s operational life. Controls play a crucial role in both managing building-services systems and monitoring the results to give clients the information they need to continually fine tune and improve.

It is, therefore, extremely timely that the BCIA has decided to bring the management of its own training courses in-house to help raise professional standards throughout the supply chain and to give clients the necessary expertise to understand and manage their own building controls.

This is a significant step forward and one that B&ES supports wholeheartedly as part of its own strategy for broadening the expertise of our own members. It is more important than ever that building engineering services contractors collaborate with specialist experts in complementary fields to deliver the integrated, full system solutions commercial building clients require.

Sue Sharp is president of the Building & Engineering Services Association (B&ES).

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