Canada Smart building has grown at a rapid pace over the past few years, and it is projected to increase dramatically for the years to come. The driving forces behind the trend are numerous. For instance, its interconnected systems can reduce energy consumption, help predictive maintenance, improve building efficiency and increase productivity. Besides, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought hygiene and health concerns into sharp focus, thereby inducing the need to adopt emerging and existing smart building technology to create a smarter and safer environment.
Challenges
Peak Power, a Canadian climate tech company, is dedicated to building the net zero future of tomorrow. Initially it adopted a smart building solution based on Zigbee technology during their projects. However, the whole picture was far more complex. This solution emerged many problems.
- High power consumption
The sensors consumed much power and had short battery life. Maintenance people needed to visit sites every few months to change the batteries. - Quite Poor signal
ZigBee signal had narrow coverage, so extra gateways should be deployed to extend the network coverage. Besides, up to 60% of sensors on site were down at any moment. - Super High cost
The temperature and CO2 sensors were costly and extra sim cards were needed inside, which generated a large amount of monthly fee.
Project
Peak Power needs to fetch environment data in the Canada commercial smart buildings by sensors’ network in order to provide the finest data supporting for later AI-driven systems. After being tested and assessed, the Zigbee solution showed itself unqualified in this competition. Therefore, Peak Power turns to Milesight for a smart building solution based on LoRaWAN® technology.
Solution
The most optimal choice for Peak Power to tackle the existing challenges is Milesight smart building solution. Along with Peak Insight – an energy & indoor air quality platform developed by Peak Power, Milesight efficient wireless LoRaWAN® sensors and gateways involved to play a pivotal role in monitoring, real-time reporting, and instant alerts in the commercial buildings.
Topology
Featured Products
AM107 Ambience Monitoring Sensor
AM319 Ambience Monitoring Sensor
EM300-TH Temperature & Humidity Sensor
EM500-CO2 Carbon Dioxide Sensor
Deployment
The Peak Insight platform contains three key components, namely data collection, data analysis, and data visualization portals, which work together to provide building owners, operators, and managers with energy-saving advice.
Milesight sensors are installed on each floor to monitor building data, including indoor ambience temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide concentration, people counting, etc., while AI-powered analytics integrate this information with additional data sources to forecast peaks in demand. A mobile app or desktop portal delivers data-driven recommendations for optimizing and reducing energy consumption at peak times.
The Milesight UG67 LoRaWAN® gateway is installed approximately every 3-stories with PoE power input and has been tested to be working at least 2km away. The 4G module in the gateway provides an easy Internet connection for data transmission.
Once the gateway receives the data from the Milesight LoRaWAN® sensors, the embedded network server is going to forward data by MQTT to the Peak Insight platform via the cellular network. Peak Insight platform is hosted for building managers’ access via the web app and mobile apps.
With the Peak Insight app, operations managers can remotely monitor canada smart building conditions, equipment, and occupancy. Get automatic alerts when the indoor temperature leaves the range of 21℃-26℃, humidity falls below 40%, and the environmental condition makes occupants more vulnerable to viral respiratory infections, or when CO2 levels exceed 800 ppm indicating that no enough fresh air for the number of people in the smart building.
Benefits
- Accurate environment data
Milesight sensors provide accurate indoor air quality insights each day to help the whole operation in the building.
- Wider and more solid network coverage
The signal strength of ZigBee is highly prone to external effects of the context in which the communication is taking place, while Milesight devices based on LoRaWAN® technology provide wide and rock-solid single coverage. With just a few gateways they can cover the entire building.
- Low maintenance cost
LoRaWAN® technology extends Milesight sensors’ battery life to 10+ years. Reducing repetitive and maintenance work allows operators to focus more on deployment to new buildings instead of going back to maintain the finished work.
