Automated Logic Environmental Index
Jan. 15, 2010 — Is your building running efficiently? Well, then you'd better go catch it!
Ah, sorry for that. We joke. But energy efficiency is no laughing matter. (See how cleverly we segued there?) It's also not easy: Determining energy efficiency, particularly for very big co-op and condo apartment buildings, requires collating a variety of factors ranging from outside and indoor temperature/humidity to heating and cooling set-points. The idea — as any co-op or condo resident knows who's had to open a window in winter because the heat is blasting in one apartment in order to make another apartment warm enough — is to have separate, independent heating/cooling zones, so that the building delivers what it should at the lowest cost. But how do you do that — and how do you monitor it?
We've written about load-balancing software that monitors HVAC usage, lighting and other factors and adjusts your electrical load accordingly. Today's new product is something like that. The Environmental Index, from the Carrier Corporation subsidiary Automated Logic, gives your super and/or resident manager an easy way to determine energy efficiency and other indices via a color-coded dial, rather than by having to manually analyze data from multiple sources.
The Environmental Index automatically gathers data on heating and cooling set-points, relative humidity and contaminants such as carbon dioxide, and displays them as a percentage on an analog gauge, using red segments to indicate poor environments and gradually changing to green as conditions improve. This lets your staff quickly identify operational problems and take corrective action. You can set it to give you data per per area, resident and building, and the EI can also generate energy-efficiency reports automatically as a PDF or as an Excel spreadsheet.
That's probably efficient — and it's definitely pretty cool, since computerized energy efficiency seems to be where up-to-date co-op and condo boards are headed. As Buzz Lightyear might say, "To efficiency ... and beyond!"
Automated Logic Corporation • 1150 Roberts Blvd., Kennesaw, Ga. 30144 • (770) 429-3000 • E-mail contact form here