The third floor of the 507 Building 1 was renovated in 2019. This floor consists of office space workstations, 16 meeting rooms and huddle areas, a kitchen area, restrooms, product display areas, hallways, and electrical and networking closets. The renovations included introducing smart building technologies to enable and promote smart building outcomes for the facility management team and for the occupants of this office space.
Bert devices were added to the project for the primary purpose of tracking electricity consumption and to control certain plug loads to achieve greater electricity savings throughout the space. This primary purpose was achieved as well as other benefits discovered along the way. The Bert devices will help to save 15,000 kWh per year on this floor alone!
81 Bert I and IR devices were installed so that every electrical outlet and circuit on the floor are measured and controlled by a Bert device. All meeting rooms have two Bert IR outlets: one behind the TV monitor in the room, and another in one of the wall outlets that is wired in series to the other outlets in the room. Open office workstation and the restroom circuits are wired through Bert I devices located in the electrical closets near the circuit panel feed. The kitchen area has several Bert IR outlets, one for each of the major plug loads in that space including refrigerators, microwaves, vending machines, the ice maker, and the coffee maker. Bert IR outlets installed in various hallways help track and control TV display monitors, copy machines, and temporary plug loads such as vacuums.
All the Bert devices were installed by an electrical contractor during construction and were later commissioned just before occupancy. Part of the commissioning process is to provide user-friendly names to all the Bert devices and to configure their Wi-Fi network settings. All the Bert devices communicate with a Bert Connect Gateway which provides more functionality including the BACnet IP integration service. The Bert Connect Gateway in this case is a Windows® 7 computer with the Bert Connect software installed, but this could also be a stand-alone device.
The Bert devices were then integrated to a Metasys NAE. Each Bert device is represented by its own BACnet device and has a consistent BACnet point list. This made it easy to integrate into the NAE’s BACnet IP integration and to involve the Bert device points in Metasys schedules, extension objects, and automation programming logic, and to display the data in different ways in the Metasys UI.
Metasys now tracks the electrical consumption and savings of all the plug loads in the space as well as cycle counts for individual pieces of equipment.