The biggest risk of any facility manager or individual responsible for the management of heating, ventilation, air conditioning or refrigeration (HVACR) assets, is to fail to protect those assets with a monitoring solution that allows them to analyse operating data effectively.
Monitoring your HVACR assets is vital in ensuring their health whilst identifying any issues that may surface. Remote monitoring takes this a step further and gives you the ability to manage and solve any of these problems without having to physically visit the location – saving labour costs and, in turn, money.
Remote Monitoring for HVACR
Remote Monitoring Management (RMM) leads to a successful refrigeration control, building control or energy management strategy as a result of its ability to provide event handling and related tasks.
Around for many years, remote monitoring traditionally uses a telephone PSTN network and dial-up modems. However, with the growth, reliability and popularity of the internet, it has become much simpler to remotely connect to systems and remotely access them using dashboards to view trends. Today this is all part of the phrase IoT.
Remote monitoring and access is an essential aspect of any successful refrigeration control, building control or energy management strategy, it allows automated supervisory systems or users to monitor the performance of HVACR infrastructure and assets accurately.
Event handling allows for the easy identification of opportunities for system improvement, in turn saving energy and predicting potential failures that cause costly disruptions to business operations. Energy and asset management strategies ensure that facilities are running at optimum levels, that assets are protected, and that systems are operating efficiently. This contributes to a reduction in operating costs, energy consumption and carbon footprint.
A robust control solution will capture HVACR asset operating data, storing it in a control system front-end. Event data can then be transferred via the cloud to remote monitoring software, where it would be critically scored to enable predictive algorithms which prioritise events and data. Typically, the technology then processes data dependent upon the specification set by the user.
Event data is filtered by the software, where urgent or non-urgent events can often be ‘fixed’ and do not require human intervention. Manually filtering, managing and investigating these alarms, would be costly, time-consuming and need a vast team to facilitate. For events that do require human intervention, a software interface is required that allows the service department of the end-user or third-party to quickly and easily view and implement corrective action in real time.
Operating and event data that is captured can be mined by management dashboard tools using pre-defined reports with filters for site, event type, date and time. This allows for robust statistical analysis of the data, thus allowing users to identify problem sites and trends across the estate with minimal effort.
Benefits: Summary
- Minimise downtime and disruption to operations, each of which could result in a loss of earnings and customer trust.
- Improved workforce productivity.
- Protection against threats and loss of assets.
- Frees additional time, to focus on other tasks that offer an increased ROI.
- Simple identification of saving opportunities.
- Precise measurement of asset maintenance and operating expenditure.
- Accurately forecast capital expenditure and operating costs.
- Reduced operating and energy costs.
ActiveFM™ - RDM’s Remote Monitoring Solution
ActiveFM™ is award-winning enterprise software that supports essential monitoring and event handling, to provide a fully integrated facilities management solution. Trusted by the world’s leading companies, the software captures critical data using the Internet of Things (IoT) from HVACR assets.
ActiveFM™ features a user-friendly interface which allows users to manipulate large volumes of complex data in an easy to digest, interactive format. IoT web-based, data is accessible remotely across multiple device formats and email alerts notify users of any potential issues in real-time. Fully customisable, each ActiveFM™ solution is designed to give customers the tools and flexibility they need to create a predictive monitoring solution that matches each individual requirement.
The ActiveFM™ system can receive event data from various systems, but when used in conjunction with an RDM Data Manager on-site, the processing burden is shared. DMTouch, the market-leading control system front-end from RDM, gives elected staff, contractors and engineers the ability to manage, and resolve HVACR control system issues on site. ActiveFM™ delivers similar off-site capabilities and control by bringing together data from across an entire estate.
Three plug-in options, Temperature Data Retention, Dial-in Access and Live Maps, and one standalone energy dashboard option are also available to make it even quicker, more accessible and simpler to effectively manage assets and energy consumption.
What makes the RDM ActiveFM™ system unique?
With over 30 years of remote monitoring experience before the IoT we know a thing or two about system reliability and weak points. To stream all data off-site via the cloud with no on-premise option can cause data loss or issues if the network from a site to the cloud fails for whatever reason.
The RDM solution is to distribute some of the intelligent data processing and mirror storing of data to the Data Manger on site. While there is full connectivity, the remote ActiveFM™ system in the RDM cloud and the Data Manager work hand in hand. However should the connection be lost, the Data Manager will continue to operate and when the connection is restored, it will upload any missed events and data to the cloud.
Similarly, in the unlikely event that the Data Manager should fail, the RDM cloud stores a full system back-up of the Data Manager - making it quick and easy to replace, reprogram and get back online. This approach also allows the data manager to number-crunch and process data using algorithms locally, placing less stress on the network to stream lots of data to off-site processing servers. The combination of distributed processing and central cloud-based processing makes for a much more reliable and faster solution.
What Next
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