Cause for celebration

I had an overwhelming feeling of pride at this year’s 2019 BCIA Awards. It was another glorious event which celebrated the stars of the building controls industry in recognition of their achievements and one that also leaves me confident that our sector is in a strong position to play its part in tackling climate change.

I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate the winners as well as all of the finalists. Each and every one of them should be extremely proud of their efforts in what is an increasingly fiercely contested competitionwith a record number of entries.

Whilst the BCIA Awards continues to raise professional standards through this healthy rivalry, so does the prestige associated with being a finalist and a winner.

After having some time to reflect, I wanted to share in finer detail with you some of the winners’ significant contribution to #OneSmallChange and energy efficiency. It is often the case that we can make a big difference by improving on an existing solution and Optimised Buildings, worthy winners of the 2019 BCIA Energy Management Award did just this…

Despite having the latest technology in place, Optimised Buildings identified that Superdry’s fashion stores were not operating to their optimum efficiency. Starting with a selected 10 stores in the UK, Optimised Buildings discovered that a potential 10% reduction was available by monitoring the energy being consumed through the existing fiscal metering at each store. What’s more, they were able to extract the full potential by implementing the Optimised Analytics platform to monitor the BEMS and HVAC systems through intelligent algorithms and business rules.

This has proved to be a tremendous success; following the optimisation of control systems, assets and integrations in various retail stores, savings of over 11.1% were achieved in the first six months. This is exactly what #OneSmallChange is all about and why we are so well placed to make the change we wish to see.

Another fine example of innovative engineering is Eton Associates,who claimed the accolade for Independent Building Controls and BEMS Installer of the Year. A key strength of Eton Associates has been developing lasting customer relationships and using a professional and knowledge-based approach with all its customers.

Eton Associates identified an opportunity to maximise performance efficiency at the design phase of a recent project to save significant costs. The innovation was to create a high-level interface with the fire alarm system to monitor the end switches of the smoke dampers at a single interface point, rather than needing cabling to each individual damper. The customer felt Eton Associates’ far exceeded their expectations through their smart thinking, innovative skills and quality of work.

Professional innovation is at the core of both of the aforementioned projects and to put it simply, this is the shared approach that is at the heart of our industry. Skilled engineers continue to identify new methods to make existing systems work even better and achieve peak performance.

It’s about having the nerve to think differently and break ‘some’ of the moulds that deliver average performance and get our systems, new and old, performing at their absolute optimum.