January 2004 : Newsletter

Sprinting Out of the Chute

EnFlex has been very busy over the holidays with a number of technical and business development projects coming to fruition as the year came to a close. As most of the regular readers probably know, EnFlex has been working with Costco Wholesale delivering connectivity and enterprise solutions to their stores. We have recently summarized some of the key features of the enterprise element of this work in a white paper that has been published in a number of places. The paper can be read on our web site at www.enflex.net/solutions/efis.html.

EnFlex News is starting a series of project descriptions discussing the value of EnFlex products to our systems integrators. EnFlex is a key supplier of unencumbered connectivity solutions for energy management and we want our customers to better understand applications that EnFlex enables.

We look forward to meeting and exceeding your expectations in 2004.

Best wishes,
Gerry and David

Options for Winning and Keeping Customers

Providing an infrastructure that supports the customer’s needs for accountable and manageable building systems and their control has been presented under pervious cover. The next series of EnFlex News will outline the benefits to the system integrator for implementing such a system. This will be accomplished through the ongoing description of a number of case studies from EnFlex’s history. As examples of typical cases, the integrator and customer’s names are not included.

There are many scenarios that systems integrators find when it comes to the installation, operation, and service of control systems. Every building is different; some presenting unusual challenges while some are very straight forward. Some of the variables influencing the difficulties in the execution of projects or providing service include time frame, budget, specifications (or lack of), existing building systems, customer related issues, and a variety of potential physical constraints. These factors all add to the risk involved in the delivery of a profitable project. It is therefore important to secure projects that provide solid long-term profitability. In the case presented below, the constant flux in the customer’s electrical metering requirements is met by the flexibility of the metering LAN configuration.

Sub-Metering Application

This EnFlex customer is an integrator who supplies electric sub-metering data for high rise office buildings in a major metropolitan area. The sub-metering is performed to allow the building owner to meter and sell electricity to the tenants. Long term cost is a major concern since the configuration associated with the initial installation does not reflect the status of the tenant throughout the tenant’s occupancy. Remodeling or relocation within the building occurs constantly.

In this case the integrator found the use of the existing EMS infrastructure to supply low cost connectivity to the meters. By using the EMS, the integrator was able to plug the meters into the existing EMS and use the EnFlex Site Control Server to extract the information. As configurations changed, the sub-metering solution is modified with little infrastructure modification other than the physical changes to the circuits being measured per tenant and the associated changes to the aggregating variables at the database. Due to the accuracy and floating point nature of the EnFlex Site Control Server, there is no accuracy lost between the metering point data coming out of the EMS and the value presented by EnFlex.