One of the countless ways to take advantage of this data avalanche is to set up alert triggers. From within your energy management platform, you can set up emails and text messages to warn you of potentially major events like impending HVAC breakdowns or relatively minor circumstances like low batteries. It can also trigger events based on these alerts.
If your facilities team is forced to do more with less, alerts can help ease the stress and streamline their workflow.
If you can envision it, it’s entirely possible you can built it.
Here are some questions to ask yourself in advance when thinking about setting up EMS system alerts in your energy management system:
What is the purpose of the alert?
What criteria do I want to use when creating my alert?
Who should receive the alert?
Do the recipients want to receive the alerts via text or email or both?
Do they want to be alerted immediately or once daily?
Optional: Should some other additional automated action take place?
Here are examples of alerts you might want to set up:
- If the outdoor temperature reaches 40°F, switch the smart thermostats from cool mode to heat mode if the room is unoccupied. Also issue an email alert notice to my building custodian.
- If the temperature in any of our unoccupied rooms dips below 55°F when in the Winter profile, I want my building custodian to get a text message alert immediately. I also want the heat to automatically engage.
- When the battery life remaining in any thermostat reaches 15%, I want both my building custodian and I to receive email alerts once daily until the batteries are replaced.
- If the pipe sensor is above a certain temperature, switch all thermostats into heat mode. Do not issue alert notices, but have it display on my EMS Alerts screen.
If you are in the market for a new energy management system, make sure the one you select not only collects relevant data, but analyzes that data in useful ways, and is robust and flexible enough to issue all the alerts that will help you do your job efficiently, and then trigger appropriate responses.
Join us next week when we discuss the differences between EMS and BMS/BAS systems.
Want to learn more about EMS platforms and how they work? Download our white paper, How Energy Management Systems Work.
