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The City of Greater Dandenong’s 20-year-old building management system has been upgraded after Blue IoT developed the world’s first IoT virtual intelligent smart building management and environment platform, Encompass Blue (EB).

Encompass Blue has significantly reduced the HVAC energy and gives users at the City of Greater Dandenong the ability to access the system through a smartphone, tablet, laptop or desktop through its custom application suite.

The suite includes a high-level overview of all systems, calendar settings, energy dashboards and alarms.

As the platform is 100% cloud operated and uses multiple telecommunication providers for the event of an outage, an alternative provider will take over automatically, causing minimal disruption to data collection and analytics.

Blue IoT worked with Socomec to counteract the lack of power monitoring devices with the building. Socomec was able to retro-fit controls on each of the seven systems to measure power: voltage, amperage and power factor (energy) and to identify any problems within the HVAC system.

Using Socomec Digiware, Edge Blue LoRaWAN devices and LoRaWAN temperature sensors, the team is able to detect if one of the HVAC systems was cooling insufficiently during hot weather. As it’s on a cloud-based platform, this is detectable even during the night and outside of the building.

“Integrating Socomec Digiware with our world’s first virtual smart building and environmental platform (EB) was the right choice for this purpose,” Blue IoT chief innovation officer and founder Bob Sharon says.

“We needed a product that integrated with ease, provided a high level of accuracy and is manufactured to a high standard. Socomec has all this, along with an outstanding reputation. It met all the requirements to ensure the EB platform captured accurate data for the client.”

The energy efficiency as a result of the new system at the City of Dandenong has now shown tangible benefits.

“The last major rectification works to the HVAC systems, which Blue IoT identified as necessary, were completed during February 2019. This meant March 2019 was the first full month of savings,” Bob adds.

“Compared with the same energy bill period in 2018 for March to June, the overall savings for four months post rectification work was 21% of kWhs of the total electric bill and 47% of HVAC kWhs.”