Latest / The Smart Buildings Academy Podcast | Teaching You Building Automation, Systems Integration, and Information Technology / SBA 458: Introduction to BAS

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SBA 458: Introduction to BAS · The Smart Buildings Academy Podcast | Teaching You Building Automation, Systems Integration, and Information Technology

0:00
This is the smart buildings Academy podcast with Phil Zito
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episode 458. Hey folks, Phil Zito here and welcome to episode
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458 of the smart buildings Academy podcast. This is the
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first episode in this series where we are going to be
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teaching building automation. Assuming that you have a new
0:21
employee, they know nothing about building automation, they
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need to get up to speed, at least conversational and
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building automation. This is going to be a series for you.
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I'm going to actually create its own playlist on YouTube. And the
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series is going to start with just basic fundamentals. If you
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watched our podcast on Monday, where I talked about mentoring
0:45
and I talked about the three tiers, you know, mechanical
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electrical it, we're going to spend quite a bit of time on
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that. We're also going to spend time on building automation. Use
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a lot of examples, use the whiteboard, just fun stuff like
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that. This will be every Wednesday at 10am Arizona time
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that will be live. So if you want to interact ask questions,
1:09
make comments. That will be the time to do it. Arizona time
1:12
right now is Pacific timezone. It will be mountain timezone
1:16
after daylight savings. Now, what to expect in this first
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off, if you're listening to this on the podcast, go to podcast
1:25
smart buildings academy.com, forward slash 458. That's where
1:28
the recording will be. Probably this time tomorrow, because I
1:33
have to travel down in Phoenix after I finish this episode. I
1:37
will say I welcome any comments, any engagement, any questions,
1:42
anything that's not clear, please ask the more engagement
1:45
the better. Feel free to plan around this, have your team sit
1:49
down and watch these, you'll be notified if for example, we're
1:54
not able to have a live session. I will say if you're watching
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this on YouTube, please consider subscribing hit the subscribe
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watching or listening to this on Spotify, or Apple podcasts,
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consider giving us a five star review if you feel like we've
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learned it. Alright, so let's dive in. And the first thing
2:21
we're going to start with is a diagram. I believe I got this
2:27
off of Northland controls website, if I remember
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correctly. It's a super high level diagram. But it provides a
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really good understanding of what I call a four tier
2:39
architecture. In this case, it's a three tier architecture. I do
2:42
want to say. smart buildings Academy is a vendor agnostic
2:46
training provider, we train on all sorts of different products.
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And we do not have any one single product that we
2:55
recommend. That's for the world of owners and contractors, we
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simply train people on how to actually do this stuff. Alright,
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so when you're thinking of building automation, let's
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imagine you are brand new and you know, absolutely nothing.
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What does it all mean? What does this term building automation
3:15
systems or building automation management or BMS Building
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Energy Management, BMS building management systems? There's a
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variety of different acronyms. What do they all mean? Well, in
3:29
a nutshell, this is what I like to tell people. When people ask
3:32
Phil, what do you do? And what I tell people is, are you familiar
3:37
with a nest thermostat? And they'll be like, Yeah, I know
3:39
what a nest thermostat is. And I say, Well, imagine a nest
3:43
thermostat, but expand that for something the size of a hospital
3:47
or an airport. I, my company, teaches people how to install
3:53
program design, cell service and project manage those kinds of
3:57
systems. Well, if you talk about a building automation system,
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and you're completely brand new building automation system, we
4:04
have to go back kind of circa 1970 1980s. To really understand
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back before then, there was building automation. It was
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primarily electromechanical analog systems. We'll talk more
4:19
about those in a future lesson. But what these systems did was
4:25
essentially took inputs made some sort of process decision
4:30
whether that was through circuitry, whether that was
4:33
through in the case of pneumatics, like accumulators,
4:36
solenoids, etc. Made some sort of decision to then drive an
4:40
output. Still, to this day, even with the most advanced building
4:44
automation systems. At the end of the day, everything is about
4:49
you get some data in the form of an input, whether that is a
4:53
physical sensor, or that is some sort of logical input, where you
4:59
use a lot of terms I'm gonna, by the way, how I teach, just so
5:02
you know, I tend to throw out a lot of terms, and then in later
5:05
lessons, we're going to go and actually revisit those terms.
5:08
goal in doing that is not to frustrate you. But really to
5:12
just get you familiar with hearing the term repetitively if
5:15
you watched once again, Monday's episode and I talked about
5:18
Bloom's Taxonomy, and I talked about the different levels of
5:21
learning, then you would have known that just hearing the Word
5:27
and understanding what the word means is critical before you can
5:31
ever apply whatever the concept is. And before you can ever
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actually design and implement things with that concept. So
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backing up, building automation, at its simplest level, is a
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series of inputs and outputs. So I'm gonna hide this, and I'm
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going to show this, this, I believe, is from computational.
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So a series of inputs like this wall sensor being an input going
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into this controller, which then is going to drive an output. And
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let me hide this and bring up this. So this is from building
6:05
automation solutions. This is a controller diagram, we can see
6:09
even more that now. And I'm gonna just build, bring up this
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image, here we go. You can see, I've got my inputs, right, and
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they're coming into my controller, and then they are
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driving my outputs later in this series, probably a couple of
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weeks from now we're going to start to look at different input
6:30
types, different output types, we're going to talk about
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different control schemes, etc. But suffice to say right now
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building automation, you go to a piece of mechanical equipment.
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So if you live in America, and you have been in a building,
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you've experienced air conditioning in some way, shape,
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or form. So think of an air conditioning unit, in this case,
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a air handling unit, it handles the air, it distributes there,
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throughout the building, this controller, this device would go
7:01
in a panel, electrical panel, somewhere near this piece of
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equipment, and would process data from these inputs into the
7:11
controller, the controller would most likely have some sort of
7:13
programming in it. And then that programming would drive the
7:18
outputs. Now there would most likely be set points in here. So
7:24
set points are not a physical input, they're a logical input.
7:29
What does that mean? So if you're driving your car, and
7:33
you're using cruise control, your physical input is your foot
7:36
on the pedal, as you push that that accelerates the car. And as
7:41
you accelerate the car that then drives the engine to produce
7:46
more rotations, which creates more expansion, guess and all
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that stuff and causes acceleration? Well, in building
7:54
automation controls, as in most things in life, it's not too
7:57
dissimilar. You we have inputs, which you know, an input may be
8:02
a temperature, and we want to drive that temperature, maybe
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it's a space temperature, we want to drive it to a certain
8:11
setpoint. So very much akin to the car example, you're pushing
8:16
your foot on the pedal, you are trying to hit a specific miles
8:20
per hour, or kilometers per hour if you're in Europe or somewhere
8:24
else, and you want to go and hit that. But you don't want to sit
8:31
there and maintain that all the time. And maybe you want to foot
8:34
off the gas. Well, in order to do that we have cruise control,
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this is a logical input on some cars, you can actually set the
8:41
miles per hour on other cars, you just get to where you want
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you set and it locks it in that would be very similar to a latch
8:48
in building automation controls. So we set that set point, but
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that is a logical setpoint. And that setpoint. And that input,
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they come together in some sort of process that we'll talk about
9:01
in a future lesson to then drive an output in this case, it is
9:05
the engine. In the case of a temperature and a temperature
9:10
setpoint. It may be a valve it may be a damper, there's a
9:13
variety of things that may be. Alright, so if we go back to our
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architectures, so if I hide this, and I bring us back to our
9:21
architecture, we're gonna start to move our way up our
9:25
architecture. But it's very important that you understand
9:29
that our controllers have inputs and outputs. From here, this is
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all well and good. But we have a problem, or at least we had a
9:39
problem back in the 1980s 1990s and early 2000s. And that
9:44
problem was visualization what I mean by visualization. It's all
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well and good if you have one air handler and that's all you
9:53
have to do with one air handler you could simply put a pneumatic
9:56
system in there you could set some dials and some gauges key
10:00
simulators, solenoids, etc.
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And you could essentially operate these systems by hand,
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literally operate them with your hands. That's where the term
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running things in hand comes from. All right, so the thing
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is, is that you have a hospital, it has 50, air handling units,
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1000 Vav, boxes for chillers, etc, I'm just throwing things
10:27
out there. And the thing is, is that you've got all this going
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on, there's no way you can operate it at hand, sorry, I
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gotta take my watch off, for some reason my phone is blowing
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up. And there we go. Take that off, because that is bugging the
10:45
crap out of me and distracting me from this episode. Alright,
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so as I was saying, we have all of these systems, these building
10:54
automation controllers, or in the case of pneumatics
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pneumatics, or in the case of electromechanical systems those,
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well, we have no way to visualize them. So if someone
11:05
wanted to control all of the patient rooms in a hospital to
11:09
72 degrees, because you want satisfied patients, because if
11:12
you don't have satisfied patients, they complain on their
11:16
different exit and feedback forms, especially if you're
11:19
taking Medicare, Medicaid, you don't get good patient set
11:22
scores, you don't get your full reimbursement, and that affects
11:26
your profitability at hospital. So that's a bad thing. But how
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do you visualize this? Well, there in lies the supervisory
11:36
device. Now I do recognize, and I will do my best, but honestly,
11:40
I'm probably going to fail at this. So just give me some
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grace, I will do my best to try to rotate between different
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terms like supervisory device gateway router, I came up in the
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world where it was always called a supervisory device. I know
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that other people in certain products use the term router.
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And I know that other folks use the term gateway, for simplicity
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sake, any device that takes multiple building automation
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field controllers, and connects them to the visualization
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software, which we have yet to describe via either a field bus
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or a network bus, to my perspective is going to be
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called a supervisory device. Feel free to call it a router to
12:31
yourself or call it a gateway, you are not wrong, it is just a
12:35
different set of terms. But what happened kind of circa 1990s,
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circa 2000, circa 1990, for sure, we started to see these
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supervisory devices put in these field controllers, right, we
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moved away from pneumatics and electromechanical control. Like
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I said, we haven't covered these, but we'll cover them in a
12:56
future lesson. And we move to what's called direct digital
12:59
controls. So here's a couple of concepts that I've throw at you.
13:05
And we'll cover in a future lesson in electrical, the
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concepts are going to be analog, and digital. So you've probably,
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maybe you have maybe you haven't, you've probably heard
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of a sine wave. A sine wave is a analog signal. Well, our
13:25
temperature sensors are resistive, meaning that they
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have multiple different readings depending on the temperature. So
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resistance is measured in ohms. We'll talk about that in ohms
13:37
law in a future lesson, I feel like I'm saying future lesson if
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it were a drinking game saying the word future lesson, I would
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probably have killed people by now. So I understand I'm using
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that term a lot. Bear with me, I promise you, we will go through
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those in future videos. But like I was saying, with our inputs,
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we have analog inputs. And these analog inputs, they're great,
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they're amazing. It gives you a lot of range of which you can
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sense pressure, temperature, flow, etc. The big problem is a
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computer does not know what to do with analog signals, it
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doesn't know what to do with them computer processes, ones
14:24
and zeros or digital signals. So then came the direct digital
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control controllers. These controllers had analog to
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digital converters that enabled us to take analog signals and
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convert them to digital signals. And thus the DDC controller was
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born and what ultimately would become the building automation
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system was started with DDC controllers now we could program
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the controller at first it was just programming with DIP
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switches something called application specific
14:55
controllers. But eventually we got to freely programmable could
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trollers where you could plug in with a laptop, and you could
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program that device or you could program through a supervisory
15:07
device using line code. Once the program was in there, though,
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that's all well and good. But we needed a way to get the data
15:16
from the field controller to some form of graphical interface
15:21
that the building automation operator could utilize, or the
15:25
technician could utilize. Enter the supervisory device, you have
15:29
kind of two trunks, you have field buses, and you have
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network buses, that's for a future lesson. But field buses
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suffice to say, to wire buses that would go from device to
15:42
device in what was called a daisy chain, it was just a chain
15:46
of devices that would then go to the supervisory device. And the
15:49
supervisory device would supervise that field network, it
15:54
would collect data from using a variety of different vendor
15:58
specific at the time protocols, and would take that information,
16:03
put it in the supervisory device, and then using a direct
16:08
connection to a computer would go and populate a screen with
16:13
data and then you could go in interface. So we have then went
16:17
from the field level, utilizing the direct digital controls over
16:22
the field bus to the supervisory slash gateway slash router slash
16:26
whatever you want to call it to the building automation server,
16:30
and the at the time what was called the thick client More on
16:34
that in the IT lesson. This thick client enabled the
16:39
operator to go and change set points, create schedules, do all
16:43
sorts of things, see the data on the building automation
16:46
controller. And at the end of the day, it really changed
16:51
things, kind of circa 2000, we started to move to web based
16:54
systems. Because what would have to happen is these supervisory
16:58
devices were physically connected to a desktop machine.
17:02
And you would physically have to be in front of that desktop
17:04
machine in order to interface with them. That becomes a
17:07
problem when you're on a campus and you need to be able to
17:10
interface and maybe you're in a different part of the building
17:12
or a different building entirely. Then we got web based
17:16
systems, which basically are still a server but they serve up
17:20
a website kind of feature. And you're able to connect to the
17:24
website web browser, and still navigate to your building
17:27
automation software. That is, in a nutshell, the building
17:31
automation architecture. Now I'm going to move into some
17:34
specifics around building automation graphics, we're going
17:37
to talk about one lines, we're talking about how this all comes
17:39
together. And then we're going to take a look at a Niagra
17:42
system Niagra being a type of system that is heavily utilized
17:46
in our industry. And by the way, folks, if at any time you got
17:50
any questions, please do not hesitate to let me know I'm
17:52
gonna take some water real quick. All right. So if I hide
17:59
this on our screen, and I go here to nope, that's not what I
18:07
want to show. I want to show where did you go. So it talks
18:14
about visualization, this image is from Jade logic.
18:18
Visualization is it was the big game changer. And it enabled the
18:25
operator to be able to visualize our buildings and what they were
18:30
doing. So what you can see here is this is a graphic, it's a
18:35
representation of a air handler. It represents both actual
18:41
logical points like occupancy set points, etc. and physical
18:46
points, like the supplier temperature, return, air
18:48
temperature, etc. Having this now enabled the operator to see
18:54
and control and monitor through things like point extensions of
18:59
alarms, histories, trends, accumulators, etc. What was
19:04
going on in the building, this really helped because now you
19:09
could have one person that could be doing the job of many and
19:13
properly configured these systems enabled you to really
19:17
dial in your building environmental conditions report
19:21
on them. For example, if you're in healthcare, and you have a
19:24
joint commission visit, because someone had an infectious event
19:27
during surgery, and they're trying to litigate, you can now
19:30
go to your history of temperatures and show that you
19:34
were in the proper environmental conditions for air changes
19:38
temperatures and humidities. And that that environmental
19:42
conditions were at least not a cause of the infectious event.
19:47
Let's move on and take a look at a slightly different graphic.
19:51
This is just another version. This is a delta system. So I'm
19:55
trying to give you multiple different looks of multiple
19:57
different systems. But you can see very Very similar, right.
20:01
Whereas that was a system specific graphic, this is more
20:06
of a higher level system. So that was a single air handling
20:11
unit. This is a look at a central utility plant, both a
20:16
hot water as well as chilled water plant. And we can kind of
20:19
see a bunch of different capabilities and properties
20:23
right here. So all of this comes together to enable the operator
20:29
or the technician to be able to automate the building. And its
20:35
associated systems, hence building automation system. Now,
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there's a lot here, right? You see graphics, these are things
20:44
that are configured by the technician, we have points, we
20:47
have programs, we have inputs and outputs, we have
20:51
controllers, we have network architectures, all of these
20:54
terms and things we're looking at today are things that we'll
20:57
be looking at as we move through the cert series on building
21:01
automation. We're going to hide this real quick, and I'm going
21:04
to switch over here to Niagara. We're going to look at a semi
21:09
live system. I say semi live because this device is actually
21:14
hosted on my computer here. So it is not a live device per se,
21:21
but we will be looking at live devices as we move through the
21:24
series. But what we can see here is got a couple different things
21:28
going on. This is the graphical user interface. All of this is
21:34
the graphical user interface for the building automation
21:36
software. Niagra, like I said, is one form of software. And
21:42
what you'll see kind of breakout in building automation systems
21:45
is you will have some manufacturers that use multiple
21:48
tools and some manufacturers that use single tools in order
21:52
to configure their building automation systems. And you'll
21:56
also see some manufacturers that have a single tool for both
21:59
configuration and visualization. This is what is known as a thick
22:05
client. Because I have to have this installed on my machine.
22:10
I'm not connecting via the web. And what this tool here allows
22:15
me to do. It allows me to do things like programming. This is
22:20
one form of programming. This is known as block programming or
22:24
graphical programming. There's another form of programming
22:27
known as line code programming, and line code. Very simply, it
22:33
is text based programming. You will also see things like
22:39
networks, I mentioned, we have networks. We also have the
22:42
capabilities to go in and set up things like point extensions. So
22:48
I can go to a physical point. And I can go and drop a point
22:55
extension on to the point. And that point extension in extends
23:01
the capabilities of the points. I know you don't know what
23:03
points are yet. I know you don't know what extensions are yet.
23:06
That's okay. Like I said, we'll cover it in a future lesson. But
23:10
in a nutshell, this is building automation. I haven't talked
23:14
about how these systems are designed. I haven't talked about
23:16
how they're specified. I haven't even talked about how you know
23:20
what you're installing what you have. That's all for a future
23:23
lesson. But this should give you a high level overview of what a
23:28
building automation system is, why we use them. And some of the
23:34
terminology. All pause the video right now. And I won't pause it
23:38
because I'm live. But I'll stop sharing my screen. And we'll
23:43
take some time to answer any questions that you all may have
23:48
as part of this lesson. I welcome your questions. And
23:54
yeah, we'll see what you got. An Andrew, it's good to see you. I
24:00
see you in the YouTube chat.
24:07
But I will tell you, the good news is if you're brand brand
24:11
new to this, once you get the terminology down and you get the
24:15
architecture down here's the really cool secret to smart
24:19
buildings in general. Every system and I would love someone
24:25
to show me a system that I can't find one that matches this. So
24:31
this is an welcome opportunity to prove me wrong. But every
24:36
system, access control, video surveillance, lighting, AV
24:42
building automation, they all follow in some way shape or form
24:48
at least a three tier architecture server supervisory
24:52
device field controller. So for example lighting you'll have a
24:56
lighting server, right and then you will have controls at the
25:01
ballasts level, you will have a actual panel that distributes.
25:07
It may be an electrical supervisor. But it exists to
25:12
consolidate all of those light fixtures, and then bring that
25:16
data up to the lighting server. So once you learn this three
25:21
tier architecture, and you learn these core concepts you're going
25:24
to learn in this series like inputs, outputs, different
25:28
system functionality, basics of electricity, etc, you'll be able
25:33
to take that to any other system, you'll be able to take
25:38
that to access control. Now, don't get me wrong, you still
25:41
have to learn the software, you'll still have to learn basic
25:43
things. But yeah, in a nutshell, that's where it all comes in. So
25:48
Andrew asks, Where does AI fit in? That's a whole nother topic.
25:55
But I'll give you kind of a very high level answer to that real
26:00
quickly. So, AI is an often misunderstood topic. There is
26:10
multiple forms of AI. There's machine learning, there's neural
26:14
networks, there's large language models, I mean, everyone's kind
26:17
of super excited about AI right now and chat GPT and things like
26:21
that. Those are large language models, they're meant to
26:24
predictively respond based on a large data set of data. Then you
26:31
have things that like neural networks that are meant to
26:34
simulate the brain, you have things you can argue that AI,
26:41
artificial intelligence is anything that augments the
26:44
intelligence of the operator. Some folks may call that
26:48
augmented intelligence that's neither here nor there. But
26:53
simply something that looks for predictive patterns, and
26:57
analyzes and reports. So analytics, things like assistive
27:03
design software, I think that's where we're actually going to
27:07
see what people deem as, like Game Changing AI. First is
27:11
things that help you write programs, things that use
27:14
optical character recognition, to scan specifications, and then
27:19
help you design graphics or design systems, I think we'll
27:23
see that first. That's why I quite frankly, I think the
27:26
programmer and designer roles are going to go, if we're
27:29
talking about what things are gonna get automated first, in
27:32
our industry, I think the programming and designer roles
27:35
are gonna get all automated first. And then I think, in the
27:41
who knows, near far, I don't know, if I knew that I would be
27:45
making investment choices, not running a training business. But
27:49
somewhere in the future, you're gonna have robots or something
27:54
that no one's even imagined that can do hands on technical labor.
27:58
I just don't know at which point that's going to happen. So yeah,
28:02
hopefully that answers your question, what other questions
28:04
do you all have, I hope you're as excited about the series as I
28:08
am, we're going to first start with looking at each layer of
28:14
the building automation system inputs, and outputs and
28:17
controllers, then fieldbuses, then supervisory devices, and
28:23
then graphics and all that fun stuff. Here's how this is gonna
28:27
work. Just so you know, I obviously run a training
28:30
business. I obviously am not a nonprofit. So what we will teach
28:35
you in this is we will teach you the what, but if you're looking
28:40
to learn the how that's what our business specializes on, we
28:45
teach people how to do things, but we will definitely teach you
28:48
the what what are things? What do they do, how do they work,
28:53
things like that. But the actually, how do I go wire
28:56
things up? How do I implement things, that's where our
29:00
business really shines. It's something that our instructing
29:03
staff is really good at has great track record of success.
29:08
So being fully transparent. That's kind of our business
29:11
model. I hope that you all will find this extremely valuable,
29:15
and you'll consider exploring our training services. But if
29:19
not, at least, you'll get that kind of very baseline level of
29:25
understanding all of these terms, concepts, and ideas that
29:29
I don't see anyone else really sharing information about,
29:32
unfortunately. Okay, everybody, I appreciate your time here.
29:37
I'll give you all a couple seconds to see if anyone else
29:40
has any questions potentially. I'll check the regular places.
29:48
So like I said, next week, we will be starting on inputs,
29:52
we'll look at physical inputs, we'll talk about the different
29:56
types of physical inputs and some of the core concepts around
29:59
those I appreciate all of you being here, I really do. The
30:04
best way you can support this, besides for going to smart
30:07
buildings academy.com and checking out our solutions and
30:10
our offerings, along with our free skill assessment is to
30:15
subscribe to the YouTube hit the notification bell that shares
30:20
this with more people, especially when you hit like
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LinkedIn, Facebook, go and share this with your connections just
30:28
hit the share button. Apple, podcast Spotify, just give us a
30:33
five star review if you feel we've earned it. Thank you
30:35
everybody. Monday is going to be continuing our business series.
30:39
So if you're a business owner, we are going to be continuing
30:42
that and Wednesdays is going to be this technical series. If you
30:47
all are going to be at Niagara summit, I hope to see you there.
30:50
I will be there along with my team. Otherwise, I will see you
30:55
all next Monday on the podcast. Thanks so much everybody, and I
30:59
hope you have an awesome day. Take care