Sustainable and “Green” Buildings are becoming increasingly in demand in today’s environmentally conscious world. According to The Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, commercial buildings account for 36% of all U.S. electricity consumption, cost more than $190 billion in energy every year, and are responsible for 18% of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions. Here are four ways FIN can increase the efficiency and sustainability of your building (and help save the planet).
One of the biggest benefits of having a smart building is the ability to control any number of building functions - one of which is energy consumption. The ability to properly control lighting, ventilation, and the heating and cooling of a building, can reap huge energy savings.
With FIN, you can easily program schedules and create alarms to manage and monitor energy usage. Does the entire 4th floor leave at 5pm every day? Does the west side of the building get amazing natural light that doesn’t require a lot of artificial lighting? Does it bask in the sun, therefore requires less heating in the winter? All of these aspects of your building can be controlled with FIN’s application suite.
Another great benefit to having a smart building is the ability to incorporate alternative energy solutions into the overall smart building strategy. Solar power, geothermal systems, wind turbines, natural ventilation systems - any of the modern green technology solutions can be managed by FIN Technology to reduce the energy consumption within your building.
When we think about green and sustainable buildings, we usually think of the building itself and not about the occupants within it. There’s a growing trend amongst building managers over the need to provide comfort to the people who spend much of their lives within the building’s four walls. It’s called Comfort-as-a-Service (CaaS).
We all know that spending the day hunched over in an office building with artificial lighting is not ideal for our health. Controls can be implemented that adjust the lighting depending on the time of day to take advantage of natural lighting, thus reducing energy consumption.
Improving the comfort level of your building for its occupants is another way to make your building greener. For example, research has shown that high levels of CO2 can decrease cognitive ability. That’s an easy fix in a smart building where CO2 monitors and ventilation control can help improve indoor air quality.
Finally, through the use of metrics, you can improve your building's performance and sustainability. FIN’s dashboard technology has a wide array of features that allows any system integrator or building manager to build a dashboard that will help monitor and adjust the building’s performance.
In addition to real-time data, visualized through dashboards, FIN’s Historian app provides insights into past performance. You can compare historical data from this week against previous weeks using a powerful baseline feature; or roll up the data to see the usage across months or even years.
FIN helps control energy usage, manage alternative energy sources, provide occupant comfort, and visualize performance metrics. All of these smart building functions can help lower your building’s carbon footprint, making it more sustainable and green.
Learn more about FIN's applications suite and how it works by checking out our video library: