[00:00:03] Speaker A: Hello and welcome to the Consulting Specifying Engineer podcast. I'm your host, Amara Rozgus, and today we're talking about all things integration, so integrated building systems.
I'm speaking with Kevin Langen and Rich Vedvik from imag. Thanks for joining me today. Rich and Kevin, thank you.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: Happy to be here.
Yeah, thanks for having me, Amara. Looking forward to it.
[00:00:30] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, we wanted to get both sides of the story, which is why I am speaking with Kevin Langen, who is a senior mechanical engineer at imeg. And I'm also speaking with Rich Vedvik, who is a principal and senior electrical engineer at imec.
We will be talking about building integration from both the mechanical and electrical side of things.
So let's talk about integrated building systems.
A recent research study we conducted at Consulting Specifying Engineer found that building automation systems are the most widely implemented technology among consulting engineers.
So let's get right to the meat of this, Rich.
What are the most common technical hurdles when integrating legacy systems with modern smart technologies?
[00:01:20] Speaker C: One of the first things that comes to mind is fire alarm systems. Now, the average life of a fire alarm system is supposed to be 15 to 20 years. They tend to live in buildings for much, much longer than that.
And like many technologies, they become obsolete. And we're seeing obsolescence, increase in frequency, especially with fire alarm.
One example is you have the way that devices communicate back with the main fire alarm panel.
That communication has changed. For some manufacturers it might be MapNet versus ID net or addressable notification, addressable devices.
So anytime we're getting into a building where we're going to do a remodel, we have an existing legacy system that we have to interface with. And designers, engineers, we all need to take the first step of asking, can we add onto this or does this project need to include head end upgrades? You know, that's cost that has to be factored in really, really early on in the project, so that way we don't get into a budget busting situation later.
Another legacy concept, not necessarily a technology, but it's a code requirement that we have what's called selective coordination of the electrical system for like emergency systems, critical branch systems, essential electrical systems, as defined by the neck.
Selective coordination is the idea that if I have a small circuit breaker that's at the branch level that feeds an outlet, for example, that has a short circuit, only the breaker that feeds that outlet trips not the main to that panel and hopefully not the main to the whole building.
The problem is a lot of legacy electrical systems are from the 1960s and 70s and still in operation today for a majority of facilities.
Well, I do a lot of healthcare and we have a requirement, a code requirement that all, all critical care, all areas, operating rooms, ICUs, all the critical branch outlets have to coordinate. Now, even though we have an existing build and existing system, everything that we add now in each project has to coordinate. And that means again, very early assessment of the project, the scope, the building and knowing do I have to upgrade more than I think? Because I certainly don't want to put the project, the client and the patient into a situation where it's a brand new building, but it's connected to stuff that's so old it's no longer any safe. No longer safe, you know.
What do you think, Kevin?
[00:03:46] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, those are both, you know, kind of tricky topics and good ones to talk about. The other part of it too is from mechanical side, as Amara mentioned, building automation system, it's relatively straightforward when we're talking about, you know, a new building and new building automation system and being able to kind of get all that data and do all that communication. But when we're talking about integrating with a legacy building automation system, there's a whole host of items that you need to consider. I mean, it can go all the way back to if you have old pneumatics. There's really nothing, you know, about that from a building automation system standpoint in terms of how it's operating. You know, it's energy use, it's historical trending.
So it becomes an issue of when you're doing renovations, getting that upgraded and updated, and also maybe doing some strategic projects where you're, you're upgrading those old pneumatic controls so that you can bring them into your building animation system network and get that information, get that data and get that communication going.
But then on top of that too is a lot of us know, with building automation systems, there's different manufacturers and different protocols and infrastructure systems that they've used over the years that sometimes do and sometimes don't communicate well with, with newer systems. And so that's a hurdle that you often need to overcome too is, you know, what different proprietary systems have been put in with the building automation system. And can we communicate with those? Can we pull all that information together or do we have to do some upgrades, you know, from a head end standpoint or even down to individual controller standpoint to be able to pull all that information back? Because ultimately what you'd like to do for your facility is pull all that information into a single source you know, whether it's your existing buildings, whether it's your new additions, renovations, you'd like to get it all together so that you can analyze it all at once and you don't have these different silos of information that really aren't able to talk to each other and really can't be consolidated into a common framework of analysis.
[00:05:56] Speaker A: Kevin, let me follow that train of thought.
So what are some advancements in building systems? What, what do those look like?
[00:06:05] Speaker B: Yeah, so kind of keeping on that building automation system theme, there's a lot more that's being done with enhanced metering. When we look at all the different systems in a building and even the components of those systems, getting additional metering and readings from that information allows us to do a lot more analysis, troubleshooting.
And really the more information we pull together, that more data we pull together is more opportunity for analysis.
And there's been a lot of advancement recently with not just trending and seeing the information on building automation system, but getting that information to kind of a cloud based analytics source. And you can look at it, they have their own proprietary analytics, they also have AI that they lump into that, where they pull in all this information in the cloud based server and they're able to do a lot of analysis, troubleshooting, fault detection, diagnostics, and you can kind of see if your building's operating the way it should, if there's maybe some areas or some specific systems or equipment that is indicating that something's not working properly.
And some of this can even lead to kind of diagnostics and kind of information that you're going to have a problem like that. We can see problems coming as we pull in this information and run it through all this different analytics.
So that, that's really kind of exciting and interesting that we're able to do all that now. It's not just a matter of is the system running, but is the system starting to get off track, is there something that's, you know, starting to potentially fail? Or we, we have a problem either that just started or is about to start.
And then on top of that too, and I'll like to get Rich's thoughts on this, but integrating that with electrical systems, with power monitoring systems, we're able to see not just what's my total energy use of the building or what's, you know, my electrical load for the whole facility, but getting that down to individual panels and systems levels where we can kind of again get more data, more information, which allows us to do a lot more analysis, troubleshooting in the building.
[00:08:20] Speaker C: That's a good point. When you think about energy usage, we really want to get as granular as possible so we can see how the building lives and breathes. But even with all of the data, we could monitor every single circuit and every single point. Somebody has to process that information and then make decisions based on that. I'm really excited to see how AI will take the reins, essentially do the things that we could be doing now, but nobody has the time to actually want to sort through all that data. Everyone's busy. So this is something that we're not doing currently, but we want to do. And we know that we can save a ton of energy in buildings if we can make them smarter. So using AI to make decisions, whether it's predictive or just real trending data that we're always looking for, but we're only getting a snapshot to be able to say it looks like every time in August when you have this temperature outside, you know, you could do all these things differently and we'll save you 5, 10%. Like that's really exciting. And as we're talking about all these systems and how smart they're going to get, electrical engineers and designers have to think about how we're going to power the head end. You know, we can't put this on the normal branch and then all of a sudden we lose power and we lose all of our data. You know, we're really talking about backed up systems, redundant systems, UPS systems, ways to make sure that the logic, the head end of this stays online. And then NF A72 is going to start to say, hey, are you using it for emergency communication? Are you using these systems for things that might blur the line of life safety or emergency? Then that's going to also impact how we power that stuff. It's a huge topic and I'm really excited to see where this goes in the future.
[00:09:55] Speaker A: Yeah, it's big and it's cool. Thank you. Sorry Kevin, I cut you off.
[00:10:00] Speaker B: Oh no, I was just going to say it even goes beyond energy use. There are systems out there know that's looking at your domestic water use and seeing trends and running it through analytics. These are out there now where they're able to see, hey, on this branch of this system you have some sort of leaking fixture or you might have a leak in your piping system. Even so it even goes beyond the energy used to looking at your whole building systems. I mean it again, like Rich mentioned, with AI, it's only going to advance. There's technology as it is, but there's a lot of opportunity there as well.
[00:10:39] Speaker A: Let's back this all up just a minute here, and let's talk about during construction. And Rich, I think maybe you can answer this one first. Have you seen any issues during construction that could be prevented with this interdisciplinary collaboration with the mechanical engineers, talking to the fire protection engineers, talking to electrical engineers?
[00:11:01] Speaker C: This is probably a very sensitive topic. For anyone that's listening as part of this industry, the answer is always yes. There could always be more communication. One of the downsides to the way that we've changed how we deliver projects is we move way too fast.
Electrical, for example, has to power everything, which means essentially has to finish last, but yet it's being forced to finish at the same time. So that means designers need to predict they can finish early. Well, that's comical because obviously the floor plan is always modulating and changing throughout. One of the specific areas of coordination is we become very well, very keenly aware that mechanical equipment usually comes in one or two options of what we call sccr, which is a short circuit current rating. That's how much current that device can handle in a fault before it fails catastrophically. And what we have to do is make sure that if there's 10,000amps of, you know, fault current available at a disconnect or at a starter for a fan, that the equipment is rated to handle that well. A lot of mechanical equipment, a lot of these controllers that come with the fans and whatnot are only rated for 5,000amps. That's really, really small. It seems like a lot of current, but it's really small in terms of short circuit, you know, 30, 40,000 is pretty common in a lot of buildings that are of average size.
So the mechanical engineer needs to ask the electrical engineer designers, hey, how much short circuit current do I have available at any of these points? Which means the electrical engineer designer, ahead of time has to do the math and figure out how much is available and run those calculations. So that's one point of coordination we're seeing, obviously, with energy savings and trying to make buildings as smart as possible and modulate controls. VFDs are pretty popular.
And one of the challenges we have with IEEE 519 is that we have to control the amount of total harmonic distortion, or THD, that leaves the building.
We know that VFDs generate distortion within the building, which is something else that designers have to be very careful of. Now, we can control that with specifying the filters on the front end and whether we're actively harmonic filtering and how many pulses we're using. But the mechanical engineer basically sizes the equipment that the VFD is going to have to connect to. And we need to know pretty early. All right, what are we looking at? We're looking at 50 or 60 or 5 or 10, whatever those numbers are. Then the electrical engineer, if they're specifying the VFDs, has to say, all right, if I have 10 of them at this size, I'm going to have to control thd. So now here's how I have to control my front ends. And again, it's all money. So the sooner we know this stuff, the better off the budget can be developed, whether it's SECR or VFD harmonics. Kevin and I personally have worked together for quite a while, and we ran into this issue with transfer switches. Whether you're open transition for equipment or closed transition, we prefer to stay closed or delayed is the third option. The idea being we don't want a blip going to mechanical equipment because we can trip overloads. We can shut systems down. They don't like that transition. And the technical reason is that the fan keeps moving and rotating even though the VFD loses power for a bit. So they're out of sync. And that out of sync causes a current spike, which causes overloads to trip.
We can mitigate that, but again, that's a decision that has to be discussed very early on.
Kevin, do you have any personal experience that you'd like to share?
[00:14:25] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, this is obviously a big topic. Like you mentioned, it can be a sensitive topic, but certainly with. With how fast projects move nowadays, it's one where you really need to be careful about this during design and making sure with all of these topics that we're not in a silo, that we're not in our discipline silo. Without thinking about the other disciplines and without understanding those other disciplines.
Because, like you mentioned, SCCR from a mechanical standpoint, right? That we could just look at it as, oh, you just tell me what SCCR I need. But understanding, talking with your electrical engineer and knowing where you are in their electrical system, where you're being served from, Are we being served near their incoming power service and with some of their main equipment, or are we pretty far down the distribution line? And then you start to have an idea of if SCCR is going to be an issue or not. So having that kind of understanding of the other disciplines, design and system, kind of helps you to understand where you need to be careful and where it's not as big a concern.
Same like you mentioned, open transition switches. Yeah, you and I have lived that one before, but that's one where, yeah, it's a piece of electrical equipment, but its impacts are going to be felt on the mechanical system side.
And I've seen it before with open transition switches, where it causes issues with VFDs. Mechanical equipment also causes issues with building automation system controllers. We're doing on a healthcare facility, that monthly generator test, when they do that and they flip that open transition switch, we get just a little blip. But that's all it takes to knock out a bunch of controllers and create a bunch of issues throughout the facility.
So kind of understanding the impacts of what we're doing in our discipline on the other discipline, and also having enough understanding of the design of your other discipline, electrical systems in this case, and what that means to our mechanical systems, the more you're in a silo, the more issues you're asking for.
So the more you can have those communications early on, the more you can kind of stay out of trouble. You know, where to focus and when to focus on things and you know when you're likely going to be okay. And then like you mentioned too, staying ahead of the game. Right.
It's easy to say, well, just, you know, finish the design early, but obviously if you could finish the design early, then the design would have already been done earlier and the documents would already be out. But as much as you can be proactive about those things, that really helps out that design process and then going forward, that helps out that construction process and helps prevent those issues.
[00:17:08] Speaker A: Speaking of staying ahead of the game, buzzword out there right now is electrification.
So I don't know, Kevin, maybe this one's for you. What impact does the anticipation of future building electrification have on your design? How does that all start?
[00:17:26] Speaker B: Yeah, that's, that's a great one, Amara.
It's certainly a big topic and a buzzword in the industry. Electrification. And it, it's going to depend a lot on where you are in the country. Right. Rich and I are up here in the, the upper Midwest where it's a lot more of a tricky topic and a lot more of a consideration as we look at electrification and specifically what that means during winter months in heating, it can have huge impacts. If we're trying to heat a facility and accomplish all of our domestic water, domestic hot water heating with electrification, it, it's a tricky thing to do and there are facilities that have already tackled that. And it is, it is possible to do.
But it comes down to first and foremost having an understanding of are we trying to be electrified right now or are we maybe going to look at being electrified down the road. And so I like to look at that as if we're thinking about electrification maybe sometime in the future, then we need to be electrification ready. And so that impacts our designs right now no matter what.
And not even just for a new facility or a large new addition, but even small renovations. If we're looking at a facility that needs to be electrified in the future or would like to be electrified in the future, we can make that easy to accomplish down the road or the decisions we make now can make that really hard to accomplish. One example would be in heating water systems used to heat the facility.
If we are putting in oils and equipment that's all size for a high temperature heating water, say 180 degrees, and we want to electrify in the future, well, it's really hard to generate that out of water with electrification.
So if we're thinking about that a down the road this facility would like to be electrified, then even with small projects that we're doing, we need to make sure that our equipment is designed to work with lower temperature hot water so that when that electrification comes down the road, we're not looking at replacing equipment that we're putting in as part of this, say, small renovation project.
And then we also need to be looking at, you know, holistically space allocation.
If we're going to be electrified in the future, that's going to be different equipment than what we have right now for using natural gas, say for heating or domestic hot water. And so making sure that we have a plan for where that different equipment would go, be it electric boilers, electric water heaters or heat pump or whatever sort of systems we're looking at to accomplish that, making sure that we have a plan in place to do that down the road. We don't want to paint ourselves in corner day one and have a building that could be electrified, but we have no, no way to actually install or locate that equipment.
And then I know Rich, from your standpoint on the electrical side, obviously electrification has a huge impact.
[00:20:23] Speaker C: Absolutely. And you did a good job of summarizing, summarizing the space allocations and understanding what temperature water do we need to develop. Because as you said, if I'm trying to get to 180, that's going to a ton more energy than what it's going to electricity, than what's going to take to get to 140 and you know, we currently size natural gas systems. The biggest loads are the pumps and the blowers in the boilers. So that's the biggest loads that we currently have. So that you look at the infrastructure for heating and it's pretty small compared to the infrastructure for cooling. Now they don't necessarily always occur at the same time, although there's always going to be in the VAV system you're always going to have, you know, heating hot water. But the there so it's not a hundred percent. We just turn the heat off and then we run on the cooling. So we are going to impact the building a little bit. As far as the service size. The biggest impact is going to be all the distribution panels, all the feeders, everything that goes to that heating plant. All that is completely different and very, very much increased. So the best step that I always have is let's do, let's assess it, let's take a look and see is this going to be easier, is it going to be hard?
And then what's your time frame like, when are you trying to make this transition? And then let's get all the infrastructure improvements on the books, get them budgeted and get a plan for that first. Because you got to have all that in place before you can even successfully think about, you know, getting any of these other pieces of equipment in. And then physically like where is this all going to go? You know, a lot of times if it's just going to be central centralized and say a cup or central utility plant, okay, I have a lot of service there already. But if it's distributed through a building now I'm thinking about how am I running through this building if I'm adding onto it, I have to know like, all right, am I replacing the service in this project or are we going to quote unquote, kick the can down the road? And that's a problem for future Richard and problem for future Kevin. We don't like doing things that future self regrets. Instead we like to look forward and try to make the wise decision. Now it's being a good steward of our clients money and it just saves everybody hassle and it makes us look like we're, you know, clairvoyant, we can see the future when yes, I was actually planning for that thing that you hadn't mentioned, but I planned on.
So I'm excited to see how this is going to be implemented. In the northern regions, it's going to be harder in the southern regions. Regions probably going to be a little bit easier possibly.
But in every case. Every building is unique. As I mentioned before, a lot of infrastructure is really old. So maybe there's a really positive lining to this is you got to replace the stuff you got. Anyway, it's already 50 years old, 60 years old, and you want to do electrification. Well, good news. We can think about both of those things at the same time. We can replace your infrastructure and we can right. Size it for electrification and, you know, easy peasy, lemon squeezy, we're good to go.
[00:23:15] Speaker A: Well, future Rich and future Kevin, I have a note. We could talk about this all day, so thank you.
[00:23:24] Speaker B: Absolutely. Thanks for having us. Yeah, this, it's a big topic and kind of fun talking about these, these parts of it, but certainly a moving, moving technology here.
[00:23:36] Speaker C: Yeah, it's very exciting.
[00:23:40] Speaker A: It is a moving target. And I'm sorry that this is where we have to wrap things up.
Once again, I just spoke with Kevin Langan and Rich Vedvik from imag. For more information on integrating MEP systems and on the recent report of the state of integrated building Systems, visit consulting
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and don't forget to check in regularly for new podcast episodes.
Thanks so much and we'll be back again soon. Bye. Bye.
