What is EnergyWitness™?
How is EnergyWitness different from a Building Automation System (BAS)?
Why did you choose a 15 minute interval as the default time period?
Our gas and water company provide one hour and
one day readings. How does EnergyWitness handle that?
What energy interval data is collected?
How is data collected?
What is OPC?
With so much data, how is it organized?
How did you calculate that 98% of data is
currently never looked at?
Why is weather data important?
How is space planning data used?
What are "trend lines" and are they
different from trend logs?
Will we still use trend logs?
What do you mean by "actionable" information?
How can I monitor so much data in just 20 minutes a day?
Don't BAS alarms alert me to the things I really care about?
How do I get a demonstration of EnergyWitness?
How does IDS charge for its products and services?
What is EnergyWitness?
EnergyWitness is an Enterprise Energy Management System (EEMS).
It consolidates all
energy-related data, from internal sources such as a BAS, metering
system or generated utilities, and external sources such as public utility feeds and weather data.
Where most facilities only ever see about 2% of the available data
to know what is really going on, EnergyWitness gives facility managers, energy engineers, and control engineers
the other 98%, creating a holistic view of energy operations. This
provides actionable information to
drive improvements that lead to energy conservation and cost
savings.
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How is EnergyWitness different from a Building Automation System (BAS)?
EnergyWitness monitor on right, side by side with BAS monitors.
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EnergyWitness is not a control system, but rather serves a
powerful complementary role to your BAS. It provides actionable information,
derived partially from your BAS and partially from other sources,
used to manage energy operations. BAS vendors' priorities have
always been on controls. They haven't had the resources to focus on the data they generate—data that is the lifeblood of
understanding system operations and efficiency. The result is a BAS
trend
logging capability that simply cannot provide the
information you need. EnergyWitness captures 100% of the available
data in 15 minute intervals, organizes it, and provides tools for
fast and easy monitoring and diagnostics.
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Why did you choose a 15 minute
interval as the default time period?
When capturing interval data, you must capture all incoming
measurements, whether from a BAS (or more than one),
meters, utility feeds, weather data, or somewhere else, at the same points in time. This allows you to compare different
trend lines from multiple systems or control points and see the
impact. Without a standard interval, there would be no way to
correlate the data readings from different points.
We selected 15 minutes as opposed to some other interval because
you need enough data to get an accurate picture of how systems
are operating. A longer interval would allow too many fluctuations
to occur between intervals and be missed. A smaller interval,
although it would add granularity to the data, it does so at the
cost of geometrically increasing the amount of data to be managed,
and more importantly, doesn't really provide additional information.
15 minutes also matches the interval typically used by utility companies.
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Our gas and water company provide one hour and
one day readings. How does EnergyWitness handle that?
Data from sources that are not obtainable at 15 minute intervals
must be normalized to match, making all information homogeneous and
aligning with the standard interval for all other data.
EnergyWitness has a patented methodology for performing the necessary calculations and allocating the hourly or daily data across
the appropriate intervals.
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What energy interval data is collected?
All data that relates to your energy operations is collected. That
includes every monitoring, control, and totalization point in your
BAS. If you have more than one BAS, we collect data from them all,
giving you a single point of management. It includes metering systems for electricity, steam, chilled water, and
fuel—even those read manually. And it collects space planning
and weather data (including temperature, dew point, wind speed and direction,
barometric pressure, and sky conditions).
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How is data collected?
EnergyWitness conforms to industry standards for interfacing with
BAS, meters, and utilities. OPC is the most commonly used standard to
interface with, and collect
data from, the various points across your campus or facility. In
cases where the data is already collected into a database such as
SQL Server, we can read from it directly.
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What is OPC?
OPC stands for OLE for Process Control. (OLE is Object Linking &
Embedding, a Microsoft technology for connecting and communicating
with various data objects.) It is an open standard designed to
provide a bridge between Microsoft Windows applications and process
control hardware, allowing a software program such as EnergyWitness
to extract data from each control and monitoring point within your
BAS. Visit the Matrikon (one of our partners), Web site for
more on OPC.
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With so much data, how is it organized?
Data Tree in upper left navigates data hierarchy. Tabs organize it—visible
tabs are user selectable via pop-up selector.
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Indeed, organization wasn't that important when 98% of the data
was ignored or thrown away completely. But with 20,000 points being
measured at 96 intervals each day, 365 days a year, you get 700
million data intervals annually. Data organization and management is
critical, both for usability and performance. Data is normalized so
that each measurement is synchronized on the same time period interval, has consistent
units of measure, and in some cases has summary as well as detailed
data stored. The underlying data management is handled by Microsoft
SQL Server. Data Trees are built to allow an organized way to "walk"
through your entire facility by location (building, department,
room) or by system (chiller plant, air handler, electrical usage,
thermostats, pumps, fans, etc.), displaying trend lines for sets of
related points.
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How did you calculate that 98% of data is
currently never looked at?
It's part calculation, part confirmation by building control
companies, and part experience with our customers. Looking at the
data, with 10,000 to 20,000 points, you'll generate one to two
million intervals a day. Two percent of that is roughly 20,000 to
40,000 intervals. Sites very seldom look at the data except for
real-time monitors and the trend logs they have running—at most a
couple hundred logs. However, EnergyWitness users can cycle through
our trend lines, monitoring data by the day, week or other time
period, taking advantage of all the data. Our customers, prospects, and the building
control companies we've talked to all agree that two percent is
probably a generous number—it's likely lower. (What's your
number?)
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Why is weather data important?
Weather data from local airport showing temperature, humidity, wind speed & direction, and
cloud cover.
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You need local weather data to enable accurate energy forecasting
and understand the external factors that impact usage. For example,
if a cold front moves through and the outside temperature drops 30
degrees in an hour, your chillers, air flow, steam and other climate
control systems will be impacted. Without weather data at the
corresponding intervals you can't see if systems are responding
properly. By having historical weather data coupled with your energy
trend information, you can refer to prior years operational
performance to better operate under varying weather conditions.
While most BAS have weather sensors, we have found their data
fairly unreliable because they require frequent calibration and/or
replacement and may not be located properly to avoid the impact of
building proximity on temperature, wind, or other conditions. There
is a requirement for "reference-quality" weather data, which can be
provided by local airports.
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How is space planning data used?
Space planning data is collected to enable energy allocation to be
done to the building, department, even the room level. The space
planning system (SPS) contains use and physical information for
all areas within a campus or facility. By mapping the energy
information to the SPS data, you can allocate energy costs at the
space level where the SPS can roll up energy costs by department or
cost center.
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How is the trending capability
in EnergyWitness different
from what is typically found in building automation systems?
This chart shows nine separate trend lines, all associated with a
chiller's primary and secondary flow measurements.
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Trend lines are essential core components of EnergyWitness. They
are the visualization of the interval data collected for
each point. Interval data is a treasure chest of information for
energy management, and trend lines are the keys that open the chest
for your energy engineers. Trend lines exist for all points in your
system (every BAS, meter, utility feed, and weather data) with
historical intervals going back as far as you need. Viewing trend lines
(or typically groups of related trend lines) is nearly
instantaneous, flexible, and the basis for performing diagnostics at the "speed of thought."
Trend logs found in the typical BAS, by contrast, are not the
primary purpose of the system. Your BAS is primarily about control, not data
gathering. Logs are only available for the specific
points within the system that you have enabled them for, not every
point in the system. If you need
to see additional point data, you have to start logging all over
again. Trend logs cannot begin to track every part of the BAS as
their overhead has too great an impact on the BAS performance. Trend
logs also cannot bring together data from multiple BAS or combine
external data, such as meters or weather.
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Will we still use trend logs?
Absolutely. Trend logs are important to work out detailed
problems that require a fine level of time granularity
before you can make final decisions.
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What do you mean by "actionable" information?
Actionable information means what the term implies----getting
information that can be used as the basis and rationale for
effective decision-making. Actionable information requires that you
have both monitoring and control data so they can be viewed in
tandem so that you see how systems are operating and also quantify
and verify the savings opportunity.
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How can I monitor so much data in just 20
minutes a day?
The Data Tree allows for fast (new chart every 3 seconds) traversing through the data hierarchy.
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Trend lines, the data organization with the Data Trees, and the
underlying database structure enable charts to be displayed within a
second or two. Because of the graphic nature of the data display,
and the human mind's ability to comprehend graphical data almost
instantly, it only takes another second or two for an energy
engineer to interpret a chart. A single chart typically contains five
to eight related trend lines. Viewing week-long trends, a single
person can monitor systems, reviewing trend lines representing over
800,000 intervals in about 20 minutes. At the end of that 20 minute
session, the energy engineer will know more about the current
operational status than with days or weeks of examining disparate monitors
in the past (assuming they could spend that much time at all, which
they never can).
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Don't BAS alarms alert me to the things I really
care about?
BAS alarms do not have a holistic view of the system. They are
triggered by autonomous events. In many cases, the alarms aren't
warranted at all. In other cases, because of the lack of trend
lines, there's no ability to find the root cause of whatever really
triggered the alarm event. We find that our customers often suffer
from "alarm spam"—so many alarms with almost no chance of them
being actionable—that they just dismiss hundreds of alarms a day.
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Is there a way to get a demonstration of EnergyWitness?
Yes, we can show you a detailed demonstration over the Internet.
You can see EnergyWitness in the comfort and convenience of your own
office, operating in real time on real data. Just
contact us to arrange a time.
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How does IDS charge for its products and services?
Pricing for EnergyWitness is modular, based on your needs and the
size of your campus or facility. EnergyWitness is offered either
with
typical software licensing and maintenance fees, or available as a set-up charge and monthly fee.
There is also a service component to set up collection and organization of your
energy data, help with an initial diagnostics program, and set up
ongoing monitoring. For
more information, contact IDS by phone at 617-744-1091 or by e-mail
at
info@intdatsys.com.
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