If you're a Facility Manager, Building Engineer, or anyone with a history of operating a building management system, you're familiar with alarms. These are the alerts that, if you're not careful with how you configure them, will undoubtedly drive you crazy.
If you're new to integrated smart building management systems, like Noda, you're probably less familiar with Insights or Fault Detection and Diagnostics. These are the notifications that are intended to provide a deeper level of operational information, and, if you're lucky, get you off on the right foot in troubleshooting a problem.
What are BMS Alarms?
Alarms are triggered based on the current value of a point on a piece of equipment. That means alarms are 100% real-time (except that they are typically set on a delay to avoid too much alarm overload). The logic is triggered, the point goes into alarm. When the point returns to its normal state, the alarm turns off.
As part of your integration process you likely worked with your controls contractor or system integrator to define the parameters on which you would like to be alarmed. In the case of new construction, this was also likely defined in the specification documents with compliance signed-off on by the Commissioning Agent.
Alarms in a Niagara-based system are typically divided into two classes: Critical and General. They also include the ability to Acknowledge occurrences of individual alarms.
Integrators can set the notification preferences for alarms so that building operators only get notified on the exact parameters they deem important - for example, only sending text messages on Critical alarms rather than all alarms.
What are Noda Insights?
Insights are Noda's version of FDD, or fault detection and diagnostics. Unlike alarms, Insights are built off of historical data. That doesn't mean the data is old, it just means it's more than a point-in-time look at one particular operational element of an equipment.
In addition to historical data, Insights take into account data from a multitude of points on a specific equipment. This more well-rounded look at a fault or issue with the operation of an equipment allows Insights to get closer to the root cause of the problem, rather than simply identifying that a problem existed at one point.
Understanding the Noda Insights tab
The Insights tab includes filters to help you get to the detail you need quickly. The default is on a flat list of all Insights sorted by last occurrence. Available filters:
Equipment - a check-box list of all equipment integrated into your system
Priority - urgent, high, medium, low, as determined by a calculation that includes how many times an Insight has occurred.
Class - comfort, energy, general, optimize as categorized by our analytics library
Status - All, active, inactive
Acceptance - All, acknowledged, unacknowledged
Individual Insights can also be opened into a "slide-out" view that includes a three-part message defining the problem and offering a potential solution. The slide-out also includes tabs for Activity, Occurrences, Notes and Work Requests. Within the Activity tab, users are presented with a chart that contains the data points relevant to that Insight plotted against a time range signifying the occurrences. Within that tab, additional points can be added for further analysis via the icon with the three little dots to the right of the Export button.
Users can create Work Requests directly from an Insight, via the Work Requests tab in the slide-out view. Details on Work Requests are address in a different Knowledge Base article.
How should I use Insights?
Where Alarms identify the urgent issues your team should be paying attention to, Insights focus on the long-term operation of your equipment. While Insights won't necessarily make you drop everything and run to put a boiler in hand before it overheats your system, Insights will help you address ongoing energy, comfort and operational problems that, if left to continue, will lead to costly equipment repairs, angry tenants, unnecessarily large energy bills or all of the above.
For new buildings, Noda offers a sub-set of Insights that can support the commissioning process, helping the building and sub-contractors ensure their systems are ready for testing and making it easier for the commissioning agent to validate that fixes have actually solved problems.
Insights are also invaluable during the warranty period, where building engineers can rely on data-driven details on equipment operation to ensure that the system they bought is the system they're operating.