strting with building control

[kolonelvonklink]

Hi In attempt to save energy costs, where thinking about starting with building automatisation. First a few light controls, some kWh logging..................?? I was thinking about a future linking with the building access control system and the building alarms system It needs to be implemented in an existing plant with dispersed power panels. Please, advise me. Thank You

[paulengr]

Building controllers are frequently grossly over priced. There, I said it. The reason is that frequently they are sold as part of a far larger project (construction of the building) so the markups are enormous. It makes doing a retrofit nearly impossible and will drive you crazy to do a retrofit with a prepackaged "building automation" system. Let's start off with what you asked for. In terms of kWh logging, this means you need a meter or submeter. Electro Industries (www.electroind.com) makes some extremely nice meters. Take a very close look at their Shark 100 meter for instance, plus all the options it offers. This is a very basic meter. If you want on-board logging capability, then you step up to the Shark 200 series. These little meters are capable of doing more functions than pretty much anything else on the market. As to lighting controls, this usually implies that you have a relay and timers among others. Here's where we start to separate things out. You can do local-only controls very easily. That is, put the "motion" sensor type lighting controllers and/or timers directly in where the existing switches on the lights are at. It's simple and not very expensive. There's no centralized control but you've got to look at what your ultimate goal is. If you want to maintain this model but do external control, you may want to consider the venerable "X-10" control system or one of it's many successors. This works almost identical to the "replace the light switch" approach, except that now you can communicate to the switch directly from the existing building wiring. The controllers are very cheap because they've been around since the 1980's (it's a commodity market). There are dozens of PC and standalone controllers for this setup. I highly recommend going with this approach because in the end it will most likely be a lot less expensive if you are working with 120 VAC systems than trying to deal with a centralized lighting controller. If you'd rather centralize it, first look at your wiring layout. If each lighting circuit has an individual branch with no receptacles on it, and they come back to one or more panels, then you are in luck. Often this is not the case in which case you have to use the above "distributed" approach. Now look carefully at the power draw on each branch that you wish to control. If it exceeds a few amps, then you will be forced to use a "lighting contactor". This is literally nothing more than a big power relay and there's no reason not to use a power relay. They are less expensive than "lighting contactors". About the only thing a lighting contactor does that is special is that the contacts themselves are over-rated to handle inrushes on magnetic ballasting (like a starter), and it typically has LOTS of poles (sometimes dozens) in order to be able to switch dozens of lighting circuits on or off simultaneously. Because of what you want to do though, since it is an all-or-nothing affair, it typically doesn't work for you. Then we get to the controller side of things. If your current draw is low (typical office environment vs. warehouses or industrial), then you can often use a PLC with 120 VAC relay outputs or triac outputs directly to feed the lighting circuit. Look for one with AC outputs and you are good to go. In the U.S., you get the best support for Allen Bradley controllers and I recommend you look at the Micrologix series of PLC's (especially the 1000, 1100, or 1400). These will also communicate directly with the Electro Industries power meters (among others) using either Modbus/TCP or Modbus/RTU protocols. You may also want to look at the controllers from Automation Direct or EZ Automation because they have built-in displays, or Omron for their low cost PLC's. I would highly recommend staying away from Control Microsystems and/or the Modicon name because Schneider is notorious for discontinuing PLC's and support for them. Outside the U.S. Siemens has probably the best support but their PLC's can be a bit tough to deal with in general. If the PLC doesn't have any usable built-in display (the Micrologix PLC's do have built-in displays but not great ones), check out either EZ Automation or Red Lion. The Red Lion Gxxx HMI's are one of the best on the market. You can go with Allen Bradley but the cost for the software alone never mind the display is more than the PLC itself in many cases. Note that you can still do X-10 controls even if the power levels are prohibitive for X-10 controllers. It's limited to on-off controls but essentially the trick here is to wire the X-10 controller to operate a relay or contactor coil, which in turn handles the larger loads. As to alarm systems, these are highly specialized systems that are specifically designed to work with their own manufacturer's equipment and nobody else unless you get lucky and have one that talks BACnet, DNP3, or some other "standard" protocol (almost never). If it does, then you can often find some sort of bridge/interface card to make it work with someone else's stuff. You can often buy add-on equipment to use the alarm system as a lighting controller, but again, expect to pay a very high premium for this. Typically the approach with alarm systems is that all the sensors are relay-type sensors (except for some of the newer systems). Signals are usually (but not always) 24 VDC, 24 VAC, or 120 VAC. Try to find the "technician/installation" manual for your alarm system. They don't like to give these things to end users, and the only information you often get is a list of labels for the inputs and outputs with no specs at all (sleuthing with a meter becomes necessary). Note that NO PLC out there is going to support the "dial-up" function of an alarm system. So at worst if you truly want to take it over, you might find yourself setting up a bunch of relays to signal "fire", "alarm", etc., instead of the original functions, if the building is wired to and uses a remoting monitoring service. HVAC systems typically operate on 24 VDC/VAC, although some use millivolt or 120 VAC signalling. I have almost never seen analog signalling (other than occasionally 0-10 VDC). It is almost all done with on/off signalling. Usually the supply voltage is generated in the HVAC system and the control panels simply operate dry contacts. Fortunately these are incredibly simple to interface to because of their simplicity. The manufacturers don't like you to know this but HVAC control is so generic (switch contacts) that almost any controller can potentially be used. You might need to know quite a bit about HVAC in general to do it but it can easily be done. Best thing to do is to try to find the technician/installation manual and figure out what your particular unit does. Building access systems are even worse than basic alarm systems. Once you get into these, forget everything I said before this. Simply bring those people in to re-engineer the whole thing as a package deal and cut a big check. Interfacing to access control systems is a nightmare. All I have for you on those is horror stories. It's as bad as trying to interface to whatever ERP system a company decides to buy to push production data into it. How bad is it? There are virtually no standards and no information on the protocols in use, and even the database system that goes with it is usually very secretive on what it is. Expect to pay around $300 per door just for the lock mechanism without installation. If you want examples, and I'm only pulling this from a google search so I can't vouch to whether they are a credible company or not, check out www.nokey.com. A manufacturer to look at is Kaba Mas. You will have better luck with buying fairly generic magnetic locks and trying to drive it yourself (including the magstripe readers and associated software development) than ever trying to interface to someone else's building access control system. Sorry but I'm not making this up. I've had only bad experiences dealing with these things. So in order of expense/difficulty: 1. Power monitoring -- easy. 2. Lighting control -- easy. 3. HVAC control -- medium (not hard to install, just challenging sometimes to program). 4. Alarm systems -- medium/hard 5. Access control systems -- prohibitively hard, better to start over than to waste your time on trying.

[automationtechie]

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