Thermometer in the sand
Thermometer in the sand

Beat the Heat

26 September 2018

The hottest summer on record brought more than just sunburn. Many businesses were caught short on overheating buildings and energy consumption overload, it’s been a summer of lessons learned and warnings for the future. The effects on business operations and building occupiers were considerable, from heating when the ‘Beast from the East’ hit the UK to an urgent need for cooling resulted in a huge potential for energy to be wasted easily if not managed efficiently.

One of the biggest businesses hit was EDF’s base in France. They were forced to shut down four nuclear reactors due to rising temperatures and potential overheating. The University of Oxford found that climate change had more than doubled the likelihood of the current heatwave. Predictions from the report also said that heatwaves are likely to become more common with summer-autumn heat waves set to continue into 2022.

The volatility of heatwaves means that they can affect business operations and buildings quickly making them hard to manage and often predict. However, the introduction of IoT and Big Data-based technologies now pose a credible solution to this problem as they can solve some of the biggest issues of building and equipment operations, maintenance, energy consumption and wellness of staff. IoT can also reduce consumption in utilities not just for cost purposes but for the reduction of Co2 emissions levels.

IoT technology is the smart choice when it comes to the management of heatwaves and their subsequent fallouts. It can fully integrate and digitalise a business while establishing tangible benefits that will help reduce the risks of heat waves. From operational, maintenance and utility costs, optimising building and business processes and proactively assist in the drive towards net-zero energy buildings.

CODA fits perfectly into heatwave management. It streamlines processes, improves efficiency and supports predictive maintenance while also boosting energy efficiency and cost savings with intelligent insights. Data-driven insights and analytics, improve all aspects of a buildings operations and processes. CODA delivers substantial, and speedy, tangible business benefits from energy to financial savings, maintenance and operational performance.

Through continuous monitoring, controls and proactive maintenance IoT technology can:

  • Maximise the operational efficiency of buildings during peak summer months by interlinking building and equipment controls with automated insights and alerts. This allows businesses to maximise the operational efficiency in buildings. It also enables them to deliver energy, carbon and operational savings.
  • Deliver full visibility to businesses of building and equipment performance, operation and efficiency. The added benefit of machine learning algorithms add digitalisation to business strategies allows users to adopt processes, equipment control strategies and energy efficiency measures to beat the heat, manage internal conditions and costs.
  • Increase asset life and reduce maintenance costs. These measures focus on improving internal conditions, increasing asset life and reducing maintenance costs for buildings and estates. This is achieved through continuous monitoring, controls and alerting for proactive maintenance.
  • Complete with mapping techniques the cloud software delivers the ability to fully visualise a building down to individual systems, processes and operations. This is done by providing energy, equipment and operational performance control solutions via artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) methodologies for analytics, alerting and delivering actionable insights for automated response and repair.