To provide building occupants with ‘live’ data to show on KyotoTV and in the Kyoto energy management application, some ground work has to carried out to ensure ‘data’ from the building can be extracted and retrieved regularly. The building itself usually has a number of energy meters that count ‘pulses’ of usage over time and report back to a central building management system (BMS). These meters can be recording anything from total building energy usage (kW), outside air temperature (°C), office temperature (°C), car park lighting (kW) etc.

To make things that little bit harder, there are a number of different building management systems – all performing similar tasks, to monitor building energy usage and performance. So at OuterArc, we’ve had to become ‘amateur experts’ in quickly working out how we can extract the data out of these systems at regular intervals so we can get the data onto our servers and into our application.

The method of this data extraction varies with the building management system. Some systems provide the ability to email out data at regular intervals with a CSV file, our current preferred method of accepting data. However, this data extraction is not standard for all systems so for others we have to use additional hardware or software to perform the same functionality.

A study of the data, after getting it onto our servers, can also reveal a lack of metered data that we require or more commonly incorrectly configured meters! So, as you can hopefully appreciate from this post, getting live data out of a building is not always straightforward but we’re getting a lot better at it!

-Aaron