I am often asked if current industry textbooks cover convergence, connectivity, and the new business paradigm this is creating. Although there are not a lot of books on these topics, I am pleased to point out that the folks writing for Engineered Systems and AutomatedBuildings.com are a large part of the ones that are available. Here are four good reads for your reference library.
In
the August 2006 “Tomorrow’s Engineer” column, I talked about submitting
responsible documents, followed by a January 2007 column on construction
documentation with more to follow in 2007. To sum up, here is a responsible
construction documentation suggestion directed to BAS: When specifying BAS
computer software capabilities, don’t specify trending capabilities.
Under
deregulation, some retail power customers are applying power purchasing
techniques commonly used by utilities to avoid feeling wholesale price
volatility at the retail level. One such technique involves “laddering”
contracts. To ensure acceptable results, a clear understanding is needed of
this technique’s limitations.
Due
to the constraints of that pesky time-space continuum, there is no way to get
news from the AHR/ASHRAE festivities into this month’s print issue. We regret
this unavoidable little collision between the event schedule and our printing
schedule, but you can always get several immediate reports about what happened
in Dallas from our main website and blog. Of course, this
will no longer be a problem once our crack research team puts the finishing
touches on the ES flux capacitor to allow time travel, a la Back To The Future, or when they discover a way for us to beam
industry headlines directly into your brain via satellite.
I
just completed reports for two retrocommissioning studies for different
building owners. An interesting - and potentially puzzling - similarity between
them was that they were both for relatively new buildings. One building had been completed just
one year before the owner decided retrocommissioning would be a good idea. The
other was a 4-yr-old building. Both were larger than 100,000 sq ft.
Frequently in my travels, I hear engineers offering pathetic excuses for why they didn’t do a good job or how they lost money with the fee they had. I hear these so much that I decided to write them down.
When power customers look at their costs for electricity, they tend to lump the price of the commodity (i.e., the raw cost without delivery) with the rest of the electric bill (e.g., distribution). Doing so, however, may miss the boat on options to cut the total cost of power.
When you’re trying to get back in gear after the holidays, one of the rudest traditional hurdles to face is The Dreaded Calendar Flip (TDCF). You’ve just finished being swamped with end-of-year projects, reports, and miscellaneous seasonal tasks ranging from school assemblies to Secret Santa obligation.
Deferred testing is performing FPT after substantial completion. Whereas systems performance testing should occur prior to the owner accepting the systems from the contractors, there are some instances where testing at the end of construction is either impractical or not meaningful.