Manual Diagnosis of Modern Buildings’ HVAC system: The impossible equation

Property investors and tenants continue to drive demand for a reduction in energy consumption and carbon emissions. As a result, building owners are increasingly under pressure to optimize the efficiency of their HVAC systems while minimizing unnecessary energy use.

Traditionally, suppliers of maintenance, such as HVAC experts, have manually checked all building systems. This has included on-site or control room system checks using a SCADA system to review each HVAC unit. The systems checks involve regular inspections of the performance of the HVAC systems and take about 4 -5 hours per building per month.

On the surface, using these HVAC experts seems like a simple solution.

The building's owners have signed the contract, and the maintenance company completes the contract. All the buildings are optimized during the check.

Everyone is happy. Right?

A traditional but increasingly impossible task

Historically, manual checks of buildings' HVAC systems were the best option. Unfortunately, buildings and HVAC systems have continued to evolve and increase in complexity. For example, take the task of diagnosing the HVAC system performance in a typical Nordic building school in 2021. To perform a diagnosis of that school's HVAC systems, the expert must manually look at 695 process parameters and compare them against 330 Indoor Air Quality & Energy consumption measurements.

Each time.

Assuming each parameter check takes one minute, this totals a staggering 13.1 hours. Per Building!

This maintenance needs to be performed weekly throughout the lifecycle of the buildings. With this in mind, manual checks of building HVAC systems are becoming more time-consuming and increasing operating costs.

Real estate needs to embrace digital tools and solutions

Luckily the solution is already at hand. Building systems and sensors are already producing a constant flow of data. We need to get them connected to the cloud and automate the data analysis in real-time through novel algorithms, machine learning, and AI.

By doing so, we will constantly check the whole portfolios' HVAC processes, energy systems, and indoor conditions 24/7 and discover any anomalies or faults. The result is often a reduced likelihood of tenant complaints due to inadequate indoor conditions or costly multi-million dollar renovations due to mold deriving from undiscovered or missed indoor environmental issues.

Above all, we would increase the time experts have to focus on proactive maintenance instead of timely manual checking.

New standards are evolving.

An industrial company today that is not monitoring its data to control its production or logistics is unthinkable. All forward-thinking companies monitor their production and logistical processes 24/7/365 and focus on proactive process improvement. The real estate industry urgently needs to follow this example.

Because in today's demanding environment, the best companies are not those that deliver the best building experience, or the lowest operating costs, or the most extended building lifecycle.

The best offers it all.

Mikko Maja

CTO Nuuka