Decision making | Decision making criteria | Typical scenarios and outcomes | Post-construction issues | Highlights of interviews | Round table at SCE | Workshop at SCE
Highlights of interviews made with architects, engineers, and owner representatives
Interview with Mark Levi, Building Management Specialist, U.S. General Services Administration, San Francisco, CA.
Mark Levi was asked to speculate on various building owner issues related to active window wall systems, including near-term automated venetian blind and dimmable electric lighting control systems.
On what basis are decisions to employ advanced façade systems made?
Implementation of window-lighting systems must consider the same criteria as other projects: project economics, impact on tenants, and impact on building maintenance and operations. Window-lighting systems might raise special concerns over the impacts on the appearance of the building, close exposure to occupants (i.e., unlike HVAC, individual occupants can “get at” venetian blinds and operable windows), and ability to make changes in the future as required by tenant agency alterations and relocations. Occupant psychology will be very important with automated blinds. If they want to open their blinds and the system does not want them to, they may do it anyway with unfortunate results. Occupants tend to like some control of their environment, so it is better to give it to them so they don’t try to obtain it through inappropriate means, as well as to keep them generally happy. Optimization at the expense of occupant frustration will backfire in the long run.
What performance impacts are you most concerned with?
Automated blind systems must be occupant friendly and allow occupants to do what they want within reasonable bounds. Lighting systems must be easily adjustable – it must be a simple matter to increase the light level of a fixture in response to a complaint or to adjust lighting for a cubicle being located under what was once circulation space. For both lighting and blind systems, parts must be readily available and maintenance must be inexpensive and reasonable for building maintenance staff. Routine dependence on an outside vendor or dealer for adjustments and minor repairs will generally not be acceptable.
In your experience with complex control systems in real buildings, what were the most critical issues or performance impacts that affected your rating of the “success” of a given technological strategy?
Two critical issues have been the cost and quality of vendor and dealer support, and the ability of building staff to maintain, operate and to some extent optimize the system. Both have been problems in some regards. Programming talent for building automation systems (BAS) tends to be somewhat scarce. At times there have problems with vendor and dealer support of some systems with regards to basic competence, cost and project management (i.e., organization of effort). It has been difficult to develop the level of maintenance staff maintenance necessary to make the best use of the various systems, and to do troubleshooting without having to rely on outside vendor and dealer support.
It is also necessary to watch carefully for various vendor lock-in strategies, some of which are not obvious (for example, embedding point identification data entirely within the vendor’s graphics without any underlying data structure or filling in BACnet optional description fields, thus making the “open” communications only really open through the vendor’s front-end software without laborious point description identification).
Question/Information: eslee@lbl.gov