From the Cool Stuff to the Cooling Stuff

From the Cool Stuff to the Cooling Stuff

When I covered lighting control under personalization and fun, the essential notion was that people-measurement can create better experience either by lighting a scene optimally given the position(s) of the viewers or by spotlighting specific scene elements to help draw the viewer’s eye. But there’s a simpler, much more basic use of device control that can also make sense. Turning things on and off.

With people measurement, you can turn lights on and off dynamically to reflect whether they are needed or not. More importantly, you can do the same thing with other, more power-intensive, equipment including your HVAC. Not only can you turn it on an off, you can adjust it based on the number of people in the environment.

Conservation and energy efficiency use-cases don’t impact user-experience. In fact, the whole idea behind them is that the customer never notices any change. But they do impact your bottom line and they can be a significant component of a carbon-neutral strategy.

You can use people measurement to tune the operation of any power-consuming device. That means you can turn off or dim blocks of lighting when an area is empty (perhaps including its adjacent areas), you can power-save on digital displays or any other interactive displays, and for exhibits you can reset them to a baseline state.

In most cases, this is a binary operation. If you have people you go to a live state, when you don’t, you go to a passive/conserving state. From a people measurement perspective, the nice thing about this use-case is that the chances of messing up in a negative way are close to zero. Good sensors will sometimes break a user’s journey, but they will almost never miss a person in the space. Indeed, they are so reliable about this that they can be used in even the most exacting security and perimeter monitoring use-cases. None of the data quality issues that can impact journey tracking (occlusion, crowds) matter here at all. It’s kind of like quantum mechanics. The more people you have in the area, the less likely any form of mistake becomes.

Of course, using people-measurement for conservation-based device control adds at least one device to the power mix that can never go off. And in all such use-cases, you’ll need to think carefully about whether the juice is worth the squeeze. If the targeted location is nearly always active, then savings will be minimal and might not offset the addition of even a low power device (like a solid-state lidar). The more often the system can switch into a passive off state and the more power-hungry the active system, the more savings device control can generate.

It’s worth noting that adding device control to an existing measurement/security system doesn’t add any cost or power requirement. It’s the same system doing essentially the same work. Adding use-cases doesn't add cost or take more energy.

While controlling binary on-off states may sometimes be attractive, systems that can be intelligently optimized based on the number of people in a space are even more interesting use-cases. In particular, dynamic HVAC control is a natural people-measurement device control application. Modern HVAC systems almost always allow for both day-time scheduling and manual operational control. What makes HVAC control so attractive is that the amount of power you use is heavily impacted by how many people are in the space! The more crowded the space is, the more work you have to do to maintain a stable environment. What’s more, even with modern and efficient HVAC, the energy involved – particularly in large buildings – is considerable. If you’re usage is relatively predictable, then scheduling can probably solve your HVAC control problem most efficiently. But if your utilization rates are quite variable, then using measurement to drive changes will be significantly more efficient than any schedule-based approach. There’s just no substitute for having real data.

And, just as in the on-off lighting case, this is one of the easiest people-measurement uses to implement with high accuracy. Every extant people measurement technology is more than accurate enough to get fine-grained HVAC control right.

Similarly, you can put HVAC control right on top of an existing measurement system. In fact, the mapping and alerting capabilities built into our DM1 platform make this almost completely turnkey. Because DM1 supports multiple maps of the same space, you can create a dedicated HVAC control system side-by-side with business focused customer experience measurement. Just create a new HVAC map with the mapping zones set to the appropriate HVAC areas. Then configure an occupancy alerting message that reports the current zone occupancy and set the time frequency on it (say every 5 minutes). In about a minute-and-a-half of work, you’ve built an automated messaging system that will deliver the current occupancy of every zone to your HVAC system in an easy-to-use form. Consuming that and issuing the appropriate setting commands is almost equally trivial.

It's so easy to do, that if you’re installing a flow-analytics system, you’d have to wonder why you wouldn’t also tackle HVAC control. And while the cost-savings from HVAC control will vary by building size, type, and the variability of utilization, in the right situations HVAC control can provide sufficient ROI on its own to justify measurement.

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