Show Notes
Understanding BMS Basics with Dean Walsh – Product Snacks
In this week’s episode of Product Snacks, hosts Melissa and Michael from learnd sit down with Dean Walsh, IoT Implementation Engineer at learnd, to discuss the fundamentals of Building Management Systems (BMS). Dean shares insights on how BMS control systems work, common pain points, and the importance of educating customers about their systems. The conversation highlights the critical role of BMS in maintaining business continuity across various industries, and Dean offers top tips for optimizing these systems. Tune in to learn how to get the most out of your BMS and hear real-world examples that showcase the impact of effective building management.
00:00 Introduction
00:33 Welcome to Product Snacks
01:08 Understanding BMS Systems
03:00 Optimizing Building Management
04:45 Common Pain Points in BMS
08:12 Business Critical Problems
12:14 Top Tips for BMS Optimization
13:31 Conclusion and Future Plans
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Transcript
Product Snacks – Ep.5
[00:00:00] Dean Walsh: I feel like with the explosion of home automation and people being able to set their time or the boiler on the phone and check the temperatures inside their house and do that all from a nice simple application on their phone, I tend to find that people do engage
[00:00:16] Dean Walsh: you know, that customer can rely on us and lean on us to be able to support them in that regards, and we can take that journey for them.
[00:00:22] Michael Bironneau: That’s really interesting. So what you’re saying is, you know, your role isn’t just to optimize the building. It’s to explain how it works to the customer as well
[00:00:28] Melissa: Welcome back to product snacks everyone! This week we kind of wanted to take it back down to basics. We’ve been talking a lot about technology. but today we’re going to get more down to BMS at its core. And with that, I am your host, Melissa, head of marketing here at learnd.
[00:00:50] Michael Bironneau: I’m Michael, CTO here at learnd, and this week’s very special guest is none other than Dean Walsh, learnd’s IoT Implementation Engineer. Welcome, [00:01:00] Dean.
[00:01:00] Dean Walsh: are we doing? Thanks so much for having me on. This is my very first one. So, uh, please be kind to me.
[00:01:06] Michael Bironneau: Well, we’re, we’re really grateful to have you here. So, I mean, as Melissa said, we’re going back to basics, so let’s get as basic as we can get here. I mean, what is a BMS system and what is it used for?
[00:01:17] Dean Walsh: Essentially a BMS control system is a centralized controller with inputs and outputs to control your heating and ventilation system automatically based on things like temperature, sensor levels, occupancy status of the building, and it tends to do this. By simply having, inputs, connected into it, like saying, such as temperature sensors, flow statuses, and it could be all sorts of different things, but essentially it’s a, it’s a form of automation of switching on and off your equipment according to certain criteria.
[00:01:48] Melissa: Something we’ve learned at learnd is, there’s a lot of these BMS systems, but they kind of seem to feel really complex. I think they don’t feel very approachable for a lot of our customer base. As you mentioned, there’s [00:02:00] loads of sensors, loads of data points, all of that sort of stuff.
[00:02:03] Melissa: Yeah. So how much information does a customer actually need to understand to make sure that they can get their building optimized properly?
[00:02:12] Dean Walsh: The best thing there, I would say, is being able to have a form of education of the system themselves,
[00:02:18] Dean Walsh: now, that’s great if you’ve got a good understanding of how that system works. But ideally, you need a little bit of education. I would say So when we say optimization, it sounds like a really big word, but it could even be simply down to the fact of just reviewing your set points that you’ve got in a building, you might find over time that your set points have gone adrift from what the original building design was meant to be, which then could cause excessive use on your system, causing more heating to be used or more cooling to be used. simply maybe starting off from there maybe starting off. Okay. Well, this is how my system is designed Is that actually how it’s actually working right now? Once you’ve got that little nice little starting point, then that’s when we can start adding in extra additional features. [00:03:00]
[00:02:59] Michael Bironneau: So you talk about, how important it is to optimize the building, right?
[00:03:03] Michael Bironneau: How well do customers understand their BMS most of the time? I mean, do you ever get to a site and the customer just doesn’t know what they have?
[00:03:09] Dean Walsh: I used to experience that probably when I first started off in this industry, but what I tend to find over the last, probably say last five, 10 years really, is that customers are a lot more savvy. These days than they ever used to be.
[00:03:24] Dean Walsh: And I feel like with the explosion of home automation and people being able to set their time or the boiler on the phone and check the temperatures inside their house and do that all from a nice simple application on their phone, I tend to find that people do engage
[00:03:41] Dean Walsh: you know, that customer can rely on us and lean on us to be able to support them in that regards, and we can take that journey for them.
[00:03:47] Michael Bironneau: That’s really interesting. So what you’re saying is, you know, your role isn’t just to optimize the building. It’s to explain how it works to the customer as well.
[00:03:53] Dean Walsh: Yeah, absolutely. I find that just explaining it in, in, in most simplest forms is, is just always the [00:04:00] best thing really.
[00:04:00] Dean Walsh: Just break it down per circuit. Like, let’s say for instance, just gonna concentrate on the boiler control or we’re just gonna concentrate on the a conditioning control. I find it a little bit more, Just little pieces to take them really, isn’t it?
[00:04:13] Dean Walsh: We’ve got, these relationships and these journeys can take time, you know, especially if you’ve got a site, a multi site estate, a big hospital blocks, big office blocks or big pharmaceutical, they can take a lot of time. And then I find that’s why having these maintenance contracts in place for these type of systems is so, so beneficial. because then that gives us the time to get back on site with the customer and actually speak to and work with them and, and kind of like work with their issues over a period of time, I guess, as well, if you try and fit too much in in a day, then things can get missed because they can be quite complicated systems.
[00:04:45] Michael Bironneau: So, Dean, you’ve been, you’ve been telling us a lot about how you onboard a customer, how you help them understand their system. I’m guessing customers aren’t always pleased with their system when you first encounter them.
[00:04:56] Michael Bironneau: So what are common pain points that you [00:05:00] find?
[00:05:00] Dean Walsh: would probably say, some of the most common kind of pain points that you tend to find is, let’s take for example like an office space. Let’s just take a typical kind of office layout, uh, where you’ve got big open area, and you’ve got one single Air handling unit that supplies that entire floor. One of the classic that you’ll find that you come across in this area is, One person in one area will be warm. The person sat across the front of them will be too cold. The person sat next to them will be just right.
[00:05:30] Dean Walsh: So I would say in big open office areas, being able to implement zonal control, I would say is a real benefit because then that leaves, at least what we can do then is drill down a particular zone area, to provide a better comfort for that particular zone.
[00:05:45] Dean Walsh: I think one, thing that I’m trying to get out there is that, being able to understand what is the maximum that my system can actually do? What is it? Can it actually achieve? because you tend to find, with set point levels, [00:06:00] instance, on air conditioning units, I find it’s really important to set set point limits. Being able to understand exactly what the best that their system can actually deliver. I was definitely say is a classic pain point.
[00:06:12] Dean Walsh: Another common one we tend to find is sensor locations. Sensor location is key. It’s absolute key to be able to Control your environment correctly. . But what we do tend to find time and time again is that a lot of these sense locations then get can get covered up. Obviously temperature complaints can come from that because the sensors no longer able to accurately monitor the temperature in the area.
[00:06:39] Dean Walsh: I would say room allocation changes. Big one that you tend to see a lot, uh, where a room used to be an office, but now it’s a storeroom. And that office previously had an air conditioning unit. The set point levels of that unit could still be at what they would need it to be at, if that was still an office.
[00:06:55] Dean Walsh: A classic example there was a site survey that I carried out for, for a large retail client. [00:07:00] And, we were doing more of the back of the house, air conditioning investigation. And, there was a few rooms that were locked off at the back.
[00:07:07] Dean Walsh: And I went, is there any chance we could just have a little look inside, just to see if there’s anything that shouts out? Literally, as soon as we walked through the door, it was Baltic. It was absolutely freezing. The air conditioning unit had been pumping away and nobody knew anything about it. So, um, whenever there’s a room allocation change, 100%, have a look.
[00:07:28] Dean Walsh: I would say unmanaged alarms, big one. now a lot of these control systems that are out there have the ability to alarm to notify you to let you know something’s going on. Could be a case where a BMS system is just tucked away in a plant room somewhere , and then you’ve got all of these alarms building up in the background, or it’s a BMS system that is incredibly visible to everybody, but the alarms again have not been filtered or managed. I’m not saying that we need to monitor and alarm every [00:08:00] single point that the system has available. Take your key ones, take your criticals, the ones that are really going to cause you pain, basically, you know, with your boilers fault or faulting your air handling units going into fail.
[00:08:12] Melissa: Could you go into a little bit of the specific use cases that you kind of see in the field with the BMS system and why people might want their BMS to be optimized for different applications?
[00:08:22] Dean Walsh: Yeah, yeah, of course. I sound really old when I say this, but 15 years I’ve been in industry for and, um, Uh, and I’ve been lucky enough to be able to experience so many different, types of clients.
[00:08:34] Dean Walsh: Let’s take a school for example. So let’s say for instance, one of their main critical alarms was the boiler system. And the boilers failed. The immediate issue you’re going to have straight away school is too cold for the, for the children to come in and children are going to have to leave and go home. And I do believe that there is probably some lawful low limit that’s required in that type of environment for schools. So that that’s a business critical problem. If it was a [00:09:00] pharmaceutical industry, let’s say for instance, they were working in one of their laboratories And their critical alarm was a pressure control and the pressure failed within the room.
[00:09:10] Dean Walsh: So they lost their positive pressure and the negative pressure a room and all of a sudden the samples that are in that room are compromised. Boom. Business critical problem That’s going to cause, you know, some issues. It all depends on obviously client specifics And understanding their critical areas, You know, nobody wants these type of systems to fail, especially when you need them the most with the weather changing now into the winter months, heating, heating seasons kicking back in big time now, so people are really going to want that for the boilers, boilers on, pumps on, make sure that heating system is working.
[00:09:44] Melissa: So you mentioned, business critical problems, and I think that’s a really interesting way to put it in terms of obviously the, the BMS is maintaining business continuity really, to a degree. Like you mentioned with schools. [00:10:00] They can’t function if the boiler goes off, uh, pharmaceutical companies, things like that.
[00:10:04] Melissa: You kind of had it around critical alarms, but with the BMS surely there’s use cases where there are these critical issues for businesses. not around alarms. Maybe it’s, you know, they need to, you know, Do they need to preserve cash flow so they need to make sure they can have their assets last as long as possible?
[00:10:23] Melissa: Things like that. Could you give examples of other sort of business problems that you tend to see and try and solve for with some of your BMS expertise?
[00:10:35] Dean Walsh: Yeah say for instance, in a retail setting . So in theory, the main critical nature of that shop is this store is people coming into this store and buying a product and leaving. So it’s a case of your heating system went down in this instance, but in this particular environment, um, that doesn’t necessarily mean that people can’t come into your store and buy something. [00:11:00] Yeah, fair do’s. They might be a little bit chillier when they do come into your store. So they might be in and out of your store a little bit quicker. Which then means that maybe they won’t pick up as much stuff to buy if that heating system wasn’t on. So it’s working out like little things like that as well, like making sure you’ve got a decent enough environment.
[00:11:17] Dean Walsh: If that store itself was, um, uh, in most of these retail settings, they do tend to control the lighting. If the lighting wasn’t on and that was connected to the BMS system, then nobody can come into the store. And actually buy anything so that I would say that your lighting then becomes your biggest priority in that kind of setting than the actual temperature does. So working out, what’s going to stop people from walking into my store and buying a product and leaving. again with the school, what’s going to stop the children from coming in and learning. If it was a theatre environment, Which I’ve done a lot of work in theatres in the past as well. If the air handling unit and the, and you’re not getting that recirculation of air, then the show can’t go on. Um, and you’ve got to, because obviously we have to maintain [00:12:00] CO2 levels and things like that in those type of environments.
[00:12:03] Melissa: kind of crazy how much you can connect the BMS to the overall operations of businesses and in those ways that you might not expect, and it’s even some of those more nuanced things. For kind of a little bit of a wrap up, would you be able to give us your top tips for what to look at, if you want to make sure you’re getting the most out of your BMS?
[00:12:24] Dean Walsh: I would say first tip, if I was the customer is, is ask as many questions as you can. So when that BMS engineer walks into your building, do not be afraid to ask him because people that just like myself, we’ve been working in this industry for many, many years And, and if they, if they’re like me I’ve got a real advocate for sharing my knowledge.
[00:12:45] Dean Walsh: , I know we’ve talked a couple of the other bits, you know, sensor locations, massive, um, room allocation changes, making sure your BMS is up to date with any changes in your building, any new equipment that you’ve installed in your building.
[00:12:58] Dean Walsh: Is it connected to my BMS? [00:13:00] Integrated to what I’ve already got and isn’t just standalone running on its own , and your BMS providers for us like learnd, we love anything like that, any customer or client that wants to come to us and talk to us about any changes they want. And we’re always open to be able to discuss that with them. So, yeah, so anything new going in, make sure it’s BMS compatible. Proper alarm management we mentioned, uh, and yeah, and again, you just don’t be afraid to ask any questions to your engineers or other teams, we’ll always be happy to help.
[00:13:29] Melissa: Amazing. well, thank you so much, Dean, for coming on this week. It’s been super educational. I’ve definitely learned some things. I hope, Michael, you have as well.
[00:13:39] Michael Bironneau: Definitely. Yeah, that was fantastic. Thanks a lot, Dean.
[00:13:42] Dean Walsh: Hey, no, no worries at all.
[00:13:44] Melissa: So, this is our last Product Snacks of 2024. We’re looking forward to bringing you guys some new stuff in 2025. But for now, we will see you guys in the new year. And if you want to get in touch, have any [00:14:00] questions, please let us know. And if there’s any topics you want to see in 2025, send us a message and we will get them slotted into the calendar.
