Next-Generation IoT Occupancy Sensors Enhance VAV HVAC System Performance

Case Study: QuadReal — IoT/LPWAN Deployment

The Customer

Headquartered in Vancouver, Canada, QuadReal Property Group is a global real estate investment, operating and development company. QuadReal manages the real estate and mortgage programs of British Columbia Investment Management Corporation (BCI), one of Canada’s largest asset managers with a $171.3 billion portfolio. Today QuadReal also manages real estate on behalf of RBC Global Asset Management (RBC GAM).QuadReal manages a $44.2 billion portfolio spanning 23 Global Cities across 17 countries.

The Challenge

QuadReal commercial buildings are outfitted with VAV (Variable Air Volume) HVAC Systems to improve their commercial office portfolio's energy efficiency. Heating and cooling needs in a commercial building vary in accordance with the number of people in the space. As occupants come and go, the cooling load associated with heat generated from a person (body heat) and any electrical equipment they are using (laptops, etc.), will also fluctuate. With fewer people on the floor, a variable volume HVAC system can respond similarly by reducing the amount of supply air that is delivered to a space. As the load on the floor decreases due to reduced occupancy, the air volume delivered to these zones will be reduced by the variable air volume (VAV) box. The dampers contained within will close to their minimum position. As these boxes begin to close, the supply and return fans will compensate by ramping down to meet the lower demand. The central air handling equipment load will be reduced to match the airflow during this condition.

Notionally, VAV systems allow building operators to increase their overall operational efficiency. Most VAV HVAC systems rely on sensors measuring environmental conditions, including pressure, temperature, and volume located on the VAV boxes and legacy thermostat controls deployed throughout the building as the source of environmental data for adjusting system performance. The downstream effect, without data-rich real-time sensors, the VAV HVAC system responds at a sub-optimal speed to changes in space temperature.

QuadReal Executives hypothesized that HVAC energy consumption could potentially be reduced in direct response to occupant load in a building if third-party real-time sensors and their data could be integrated with an existing VAV HVAC deployment. WaveCastle and Andorix Inc. were engaged to support the QuadReal OM Team with identifying a solution that would provide metrics, monitoring, and analytics from IoT based presence detection sensors in order to:

• Detect occupants in tenant fit-out spaces, tenant common areas, and public concourses
• Detect occupancy without requiring movement of individuals
• Measure occupancy on an individual basis throughout all areas of the building for the purposes of developing metrics and analytics on foot traffic and occupancy trends
• Collect data in real-time to provide platform and API integration compatibility with the existing VAV HVAC system

The Solution

QuadReal identified the Commerce Court West tower as an ideal site inside their commercial portfolio to pilot innovation initiatives. Andorix Inc. and WaveCastle were engaged to replace legacy active ethernet infrastructure used for base building management with fibre optic-based PON (Passive Optical Network) Converged Network Services that effectively future-proof commercial properties for Smart Building, IoT, and 5G deployment initiatives. Real-time occupancy sensor data is made available to the control system of the HVAC platform, that information can then be used to initiate a HVAC system response. In the case of a VAV HVAC system, this can permit immediate reduction of cooling when a space is unoccupied by isolating the associate zone. This offers an extended mode of reduced energy consumption, and increased operational savings.

Working in partnership with WaveCastle, BehrTech, Xandar Kardian, Andorix, and the QuadReal OM Engineering Team a pilot study was commissioned. The scope of the pilot including testing the proposed solution and its effectiveness in improving VAV HVAC system performance over a week where QuadReal planned for sporadic, variable occupancy, and significant foot traffic through the test floor. The pilot goal was to record and observe the responsiveness of the VAV HVAC system when changes were implemented using the real-time data sensor feeds and compare those results to normal operating conditions.

QuadReal and the pilot study team deployed base building, wireless last-mile, and IoT sensor technology to provide network service coverage on a single floor of the Commerce Court West building. The team worked with the QR Facilities Engineering staff to integrate the real-time data feeds from these sensors with the VAV control system. The deployment methodology was as follows:

Converge Network Service for Base Building Network & Standard WiFi

• Andorix Inc. deployed PON Converged Network Service infrastructure inside all telecom riser rooms, within the main telecom room, and last-mile physical network drops needed for wireless base station deployment

LPWAN IoT Wireless Network Service

• BehrTech and Andorix deployed MyThings (MIoTy) LPWAN base stations around Commerce Court West in order to deliver low-powered wireless connectivity service to IoT occupancy sensors for presence detection sensors specifically deployed at a range from the base stations on the 48th floor of the building

IoT Sensors for Presence Detection & Occupancy Counting

• Xandar Kardian next-generation occupancy sensors were installed in key locations around the 48th floor of Commerce Court West in order to detect occupancy and the total number of individuals in both tenant fit-out space, common areas, and washrooms

The Outcome

The pilot project was run on the 48th-floor of Commerce Court West for a period of one week. QuadReal’s Engineering team observed that as the occupancy of the space decreased, VAV boxes and induction valves along the perimeter instantaneously went to the minimum position, which for the most part is 0% flow. Upstream, the supply fan feeding a specific VAV box reduced its cooling (equivalent kW) and motor demand (kW) by a proportional amount. Finally, the return fan’s flow also decreased a proportional amount, resulting in equivalent fan energy savings (kW). All of these will have inherent effects on the central heating and cooling plant equipment.

The graphs below detail the cost savings, net energy, instantaneous energy, and finally the cumulative energy consumption metrics recorded over a week in September.

The Highlights

• QuadReal projected savings are in the range of $14,500 per floor annually.
• As expected, the buildings see the biggest savings during off-peak hours and as individuals leave their spaces during meetings or out-of-office tasks.
• There were consistent savings during both unoccupied occupied hours
• The Simulated Case graph closely follows the Base Case, because, though the various individual Xandar sensors are triggering on/off independently, the average floor occupancy schedule follows the same pattern as the base case

POC Technology Observations & Lessons

The pilot project technology teams provided post-mortem feedback on real-world product, service, and platform performance after the six-month pilot term concluded. The following observations were key learnings from the pilot project:

• Building materials used inside public spaces including washrooms differ greatly from those used in tenant fit-out construction, and require adjustments in technology deployment methodologies to realize equivalent performance compared to tenant-occupied spaces
• Wireless technologies required for IoT sensor deployment that leverage license-free radio spectrum are competing with other technologies using that same spectrum
• Xandar Kardian Wireless IoT Sensors provided a simple deployment model, robust API support leveraging RESTful architecture that supports JSON, XML, and HTML based query responses
• Xandar Kardian Wireless IoT occupancy sensors exceeded the requirements set out in the pilot design phase, delivering accurate data on occupancy, the volume of individuals across the entire floor, as well as location information far beyond the initial specifications in real-time

About the Case Study Team

WaveCastle Consulting Inc.

Founded in 2020, WaveCastle Consulting Inc. is a telecommunications and digital infrastructure professional services firm based in Toronto, ON. We specialize in advancing investment initiatives on behalf of real estate operators across diverse asset class portfolios as well as supporting technology partners serving the real estate community. We have a wealth of experience with fibre optic networks, wireless, and IoT service delivery inside multi-use buildings, as well as inside and outside plant telecommunications infrastructure deployments.

Andorix Inc.

Andorix Inc. provides a suite of managed IT services to mid-size enterprises in Ontario, including point-to-point private fibre connectivity, in-building network solutions, specialized cloud platforms and digital services. We are the enablers of digital services for our customers, with the sole mission and responsibility to help them create value.

Andorix was formed from a merger of two partner-led market-leading organizations with a combined 36 years’ experience in providing managed IT solutions. Our expertise in Managed as-a Service, Backup and Disaster Recovery, Application Management, Network, IoT, and Smart Building allows us to provide our customers with the platform to leverage cloud technologies for continued innovation.

BEHRTECH

BehrTech offers a disruptive wireless connectivity software platform that is purpose-built for massive-scale IoT networks. At the core of the platform is MIOTY, a new communication technology standardized by ETSI that provides reliable, robust, and scalable connectivity unlike any other technology on the market. With its approach to interoperability, BehrTech makes it easy for end-users to retrofit its MYTHINGS platform in any environment and enables partners, system integrators, and VARs to deliver fully-integrated IIoT solutions that enable data-driven decisions to be made.

Xandar Kardian

Xandar Kardian is a 3-year-old start-up with research dating back 9 years — starting in 2011 with a team of 15 Ph.D and M.S engineers in radar digital signal processing. The company is sometimes referred to as being the “Microsoft” of the radar industry, having proprietary and patented solutions using radars. Some of the solutions include vital sign monitoring (resting heart rate, breathing rate), movement index (including cough detection, fall detection and people counting capability) and environmental radar mapping.