An intelligent building automation solution for student dormitories

If buildings could talk, they would have a lot to tell. And in the United States, Bosch subsidiary Climatec, is now helping the market leader make private student dormitories talk, as it were. American Campus Communities (ACC) is the country’s largest private company specialized in developing, building, and managing student housing. For some time now, they have been pursuing to capture as much data on its properties’ energy consumption as possible. ACC’s portfolio spans over 160 dormitories, 93 of which it directly operates, with a grand total of more than 140,000 beds. With its current initiative to increase energy efficiency and reduce operating costs, ACC aims to play a pioneering role in the market. In the USA, the individual states bear most of the responsibility for complying with legal requirements on buildings’ energy efficiency. ACC therefore wants to increase energy efficiency as part of its strategy for strengthening its market leadership. Their new facilities have already been certified as eco-friendly by the international LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) program, and now is tackling the task of upgrading the existing dormitories to match these standards.

Work therefore began in 2021 to upgrade the energy efficiency of 25 existing buildings – with support from Climatec which is one of the country’s largest providers of building automation, energy, and security solutions. “Those in charge at ACC know that data is key for improving energy efficiency while reducing costs,” says Nick Kramer, an account executive at Climatec. This is particularly true for older properties, where significant improvements can be made with a modest investment. The new buildings are already equipped with modern automation systems, and over the next 10 years ACC wants to raise all of the older ones to the same technical standard. “To get the most out of these state-of-the-art technologies, we’ve created a uniform infrastructure,” explains Nick Kramer. Their properties are supplied with heat, power, and water more efficiently and cost-effectively since they are centrally controlled. Ultimately leading to enhanced comfort for residents.

The challenge was that 12 building automation solutions from different manufacturers were installed in the 25 dormitories. “But we succeeded in combining all of them on a single platform.” The heterogeneous technical building automation systems also prevented ACC’s central facility management department in Austin from accessing all of them. “With multiple systems in place it made it difficult to provide the necessary technical experience to local teams and pertinent information to ACC’s central facility management team. The solution was to route the data from the individual buildings to the cloud. Now all of the systems are managed via the same platform from a single location. Exactly what the customer wanted!”

The Climatec team applied the “crawl, walk, run” approach – a proven method for implementing a strategy a step at a time. “Our contacts at ACC know that Climatec always comes up with an innovative, custom-tailored approach to master each challenge. Here we accomplished it in three steps. In the crawl phase, we dealt with the basics, installing interfaces for the buildings’ automation systems to communicate with the Tridium Niagara 4 management platform. In the walk phase, we compiled a list of all of the installed sensors and measurement devices and supplemented them with additional data points. This way we get detailed information on consumption. To achieve it, we installed flow meters in the water pipes to monitor how much passes through them. All of this is visualized on the management platform in an up-to-the-minute overview. And finally the run, we combined all of the data and used it to develop a higher-level standard that can be applied across the entire building portfolio.”

Standards are essential because the dorms vary in size; up to 1,500 students can reside in one at a time. By applying these standards, we can figure out how consumption is affected by factors like the time of day, the season, the weather, or semester breaks and see how well a particular building meets the standard that was developed in the run phase. In the next step, measures like replacing fittings and installing low-flow faucet aerators are developed. Those that work are designated as best practices and applied in other buildings.

To merge the varying building automation systems in ACC’s buildings in a central management platform, the data from the various control systems was harmonized and configured so that relevant reports, comparisons, and trends could be clearly displayed on a well-organized dashboard. Especially in building management, artificial intelligence delivers transparency that helps the facility managers and technicians understand a building and all of its interconnections and optimize processes. The standard operating system used at ACC, Tridium N4, uses intelligent diagnosis and analyze algorithms to quickly spot leaks in the water system. If anything deviates from the standard, the system sends an alarm signal to the central facility management department. The operators there can easily locate a possible leak, with just a few clicks and dispatch a technician to fix it. It used to be very time-consuming to determine that something wasn’t right, costing more valuable time and resources. “Since the central facility management department can now reliably control things remotely, much less personnel is needed on site to inspect the systems. ACC enormously benefits from this,” explains Nick Kramer.

The next step will be to introduce real-time analyses. The use of intelligent algorithms will also support predictive identification of systems that are in danger of failing. The longer the system runs, the more information it will collect and learn, enabling it to automatically generate recommendations for action. “I imagine AI as the smartest engineer that has ever graduated from the world’s best university,” says Nick Kramer. “Its task is to capture data in a building and analyze it. It never gets tired, never has to sleep, and keeps on comparing data points over and over again. This enables it to spot anomalies – and, for example, observe that with each passing hour it takes a fraction of a second longer to cool a room. This fraction of a second gradually keeps getting longer until finally the air conditioning system no longer cools the room at all,” says Nick Kramer. “Normally you wouldn’t notice a problem like that until it gets too hot in the room.”

Facility management isn’t all that benefits from the newly captured data. ACC employs its own sustainability team that, in addition to dealing with consumption issues, is advancing efforts to renewably generate energy by installing solar panels and avoid plastic waste, among other things. The overriding goal is to significantly reduce Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions. Consumption is therefore systematically monitored and assessed to derive a reliable picture of the overall situation. As captured data accumulates over the course of years, it enables increasingly detailed conclusions to be drawn about efficiency.

With a foundation of trust, American Campus Communities and Climatec will continue their long-term partnership, extending these benefits to future properties. As Nick Kramer put it, "Rome wasn’t built in a day."