Your BAS Planned Obsolescence has an Amazing Solution - Computrols LX

Perhaps you already know that the major BAS Companies have a planned obsolescence future waiting for you. I have been in the controls business for 38 years and have seen all these events as very disruptive to owners from an operational perspective but also as a budget buster. I remember as a Project Manager with JCI, being proud of the fact that all sales and management staff was selling BAS products they claimed would always be backward compatible and we would never leave any of our customers behind from a technology perspective. That started to change with the Metasys Line in the mid-90’s and I took that action as a walk away from integrity. It was a big decider and one reason I walked away from JCI.

Today Siemen and the many Niagara (Honeywell) Building Controllers that are utilized in all most every manufactures integration to their older systems are demanding upgrades to newer platforms that have not even in operational for 10 years. Would you consider that planned obsolescence? I do!

I have spent a majority of my time since leaving JCI in the commissioning and retro-commissioning of buildings of all types and sizes mostly in higher education facilities. Not many of us providing these services have actually been controls guys. What I did find, was the controls companies very seldom completely finished their projects in hope they would have a service contract at the end and would be given opportunity to correct and finish all those incomplete issues and be paid twice for that service and reap rewards for doing such a great job. Do you find any integrity with that pattern?

In the fall of 2018 a controls’ company with the name of Computrols reached out and asked if I would become a Distribution Partner for them in Pennsylvania. I advised them that would depend, I’d need to see their manufacturing facility to ensure these products were actually made in America, talk with management to determine that their values would coexist with mine, and to chat with a few of their clients to understand if they walked their talk. I had a great trip to New Orleans and drove away with a partnership agreement in hand.

I was especially intrigued with the wireless products in the final stages of testing before going to market and that they had created a backward integration into almost every BAS system I had touched, giving them total control over those existing IO points. I then thought what a great counter offer to owners, who had been shown that profits over integrity and a process planned obsolescence were “have-too events”, and instead they could embrace and reduce their energy use, avoid mandatory service contracts and begin an inhouse management of their building automation systems without large service contracts.

I was just an old controls guy, who was ready for retirement when this company came knocking on my door. They offered an opportunity to fix so many wrongs in a system I worked in for most of my work career, I had to just give it a shot, not for me but for you! Made in America, Lifetime Warranty, easy to program, Integration into those systems the manufacturers just want you to replace today.

Integration of the majors we do really well by reverse engineering their communication protocols, giving our building controllers full control of all the IOs, allowing for Great building management, optimization, additional energy savings and the elimination of high cost service contracts. Pretty easy to integrate a JCI system where the communication trunks are relocated to one of our LX controllers and a discovery process to completed, with all the while leaving those legacy controllers active until they fail on their own.

At your service!

https://www.computrols.com/integration/