What exactly IS a Smart Building anyway?

To the uninitiated, Smart Buildings sound like futuristic tech from The Jetsons or perhaps Back to the Future.

Really speaking though, they're not so scary. We can find Smart Buildings at any level, from the smaller domestic abodes, right up to military installations. The term Smart is generally applied to any use of computer technology - used in this instance on building operations, usually to monitor and record data, or to automate controls.

In the home, we are seeing more Smart thermostats on the market. These can offer such simple services as, monitor the heating in your home, and adjust the heating controls automatically to meet a required setpoint temperature.

This is just the beginning, and we live in a world hungry for data. We want to know how many steps we've walked in a day, or what the weather will be like at 7pm. Our smart phones track our every move using GPS satellites, and our internet browsers know exactly which adverts and products to sell to us. We want to access our heating or our door cameras from another location. Alexa rules the house and does as she pleases, playing music from the Cloud and randomly laughing or swearing at people.

(It's true - look it up!) Alexa gone wrong!

So, what do we want from a Smart Building?

The most popular answer is, of course, to SAVE MONEY and we can do that by reducing the biggest contributing cost in our buildings - energy and resource use. Any "Einstein" can save money by just switching things off. Fantastic.

But not everyone can understand and optimise their energy use. What if you'd like to know how much something costs to run? Or, if energy is being used to heat or light a room that noone has used? This may be easier to work out in a 2 bedroomed house, but not in, say, a shopping centre! At the industrial level, things simply have to run - and the key is in finding out how to optimise the efficiency of our energy and resource use.

Wouldn't it be great if you could just go to a computer, and find out any building or operation information that you wanted - straight away? Or even better, receive automatic notifications when something is due for a service, or is experiencing a fault?

SkySpark and data analytics

The technology to do this is already here, and one such example is the SkySpark data analytics platform. SkySpark is fast becoming adopted into commercial properties around the world, and winning awards too!

We don't sell SkySpark at Fantom Factory, we provide support and training services, especially for anyone new to this technology. We've even aligned our eLearning reselling prices with the SkySpark distribution model, so now you can purchase Fantom Factory training from your SkySpark reseller for added benefits.

We believe that by helping consumers to better understand how to save energy, we can really help to save our planet. If you have a few minutes, why not sign up to our eLearning training site, and try our free SkySpark mini challenge - Watt's Up!?

>> Launch your mission to Mars <<

Use this access to code to gain access to the free mini challenge!

WATT-2020

See you on Mars!