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Multisite Portfolios
Predictive Maintenance
To ensure the performance of HVAC systems, preventative maintenance is key, however with the cost of on-site labour increasing and budgets for these types of services being reduced, the client can end up having to sacrifice quality for cost saving. Technology is constantly progressing in the field of remote monitoring and smart analytics, enabling HVAC services to move to a predictive model – providing increased levels of monitoring and reporting and reducing the labour required onsite.
One of the barriers to businesses taking up this type of technology and service level has been the initial investment required to get their building equipment communicating relevant data so it can be analysed remotely. However, with the IOT market now brimming with cost effective solutions, doors will open to support you moving to a predictive maintenance model, reducing costs for maintenance and improving visibility and reporting.
How can we use IOT to support a predictive maintenance schedule?
Through our IOT device network, we select the right equipment for your estate, looking at resilience, cost and communication protocol. We then incorporate this with your existing HVAC equipment, linking the devices via a secure IT network.
Our approach is to use all existing technology to the best of its ability, so where we can retrieve data from your existing systems we will do so. Once the data is retrieved from your estate, we will store this in the cloud, analysing the data through big data tools, resulting in a performance dash available to you via your desktop or mobile device.
Through our detection tools, we are able to compare even the slightest changes in the gathered data, reviewing both operational performance and energy efficiency against previous period data.
Proactive Comfort Reporting
When you are managing a large portfolio there is an extensive amount of data from your buildings available to you. The challenge is creating something meaningful from this data to be able to make smarter decisions for your business. Often hot and cold complaints can be logged and reactively managed through call outs as and when they happen, resolving the issue after there has already been discomfort reported.
Through our predictive comfort reporting you can start to make proactive decisions around your estate based on each building’s performance against the outside temperature. Over time a profile is developed for each building, showing the average temperature performance against each external temperature.
An example of how this data is then displayed is below
Using a base temperature of 21-degrees (white), we display the temperatures above this on a sliding colour scale, with red being the hottest. Similarly, we display the temperatures below this on a sliding scale, with blue being the coldest.
As this profile builds, you can see which buildings consistently underperform against the 21-degree setpoint so you can start to look at weather forecasting, and seasonal changes to direct any investment and maintenance scheduling. The sites highlighted within the black box below show that they don’t appear to have very much control over the internal temperature. The outside temperature and the internal temperature are pretty much moving together. The sites highlighted within the below black box are able to heat effectively when the outside temperature gets colder, but don’t appear to be able to cool effectively.
The below site can keep the building cool when the temperature outside increases, but is unable to keep the building warm when the temperature outside gets cooler.
We have a range of low cost options to collect this data; usually there are already sensors within your estate that we can pull this data from, however where there aren’t, Thermatic can provide wireless temperature logging devices and utilise local weather station data for each site to provide a cost effective data gathering solution.
Realtime Activity Reporting
When managing a national team of engineers and supporting and communicating with over 7000 sites, we need to know what’s going on on the ground. Thermatic utilise realtime activity reporting direct from our engineers devices to provide a transparent and resilient client reporting tool.
In addition to providing activity information, through efficient planning systems we are able to not only reduce drive time for the health and safety of our engineers, but also reduce our carbon footprint.
We invest in our systems so we can provide a highly efficient delivery model for our clients. Some of the benefits of this are:
- Local availability and location reporting for our engineers alongside our client sites to allow us to make smarter decisions around allocation and deployment
- Optimised route planning to reduce delays and allow us to deliver our services more efficiently
- Our engineers have visibility of their diary to they can ensure they are prepared with any specialist tools or equipment, reducing repeat visits
- Our engineers get full location details, including directions via google maps to ensure they get to our customers on time
- Our platform allows the engineer to get an electronic signature from site, along with any images and include them within the job sheet, reducing administration for both Thermatic and our clients
- Our platform can also integrate with a large range of client systems, to reduce administration for our client and speed up compliance reporting and the rectification of issues identified.
