The green building movement is gaining momentum.

The increased demand for sustainable and healthy buildings, from investors and tenants, has resulted in extensive effort from leading property developers to achieve green building status for the properties over the past years.

proof of the sustainability status has been achieved by obtaining relevant certificates such as BREEAM and LEED and by participating in annual responsibility assessments, such as GRESB and GRI. In parallel, national climate projects and energy efficiency programs have led governments and municipalities to approve and incentivize the development of green buildings.

Furthermore, the concern about indoor climate and its connection to consumers' wellbeing – especially during the pandemic - has intensified. Offering a good indoor climate has become a significant competitive advantage in addition to the green building status.

The right technology for the right role.

Great improvements and results in sustainability have not appeared on their own. Substantial investments have been made into new energy systems, modern building technologies, and automation systems to reduce CO2 emissions and environmental impact.

But to keep up with the sustainability and indoor climate requirements, these new systems' usability and performance need to be managed and kept updated throughout their full life cycle. This requires a change in processes.

The old "control-room + consultant" combo is insufficient

For more than 30 years, building automation systems has typically been monitored with central control-room software, often called SCADA system.

Over the last ten years, an increasing amount of HVAC service companies have surged, offering new energy services. Unfortunately, most of these consultant services fail in addressing the aforementioned requirements. Predominately, these service companies use 30-year-old SCADA control-room software, do it with infrequent inspections, and provide a manual analysis of the different values and measurements.

As a result, the current systems and operating model is relentlessly slow and inefficient. Additionally, quality results are often dependent on the competence of the building services consultant. This creates process inefficiencies and increased overheads for the owner.

Digitalizing energy systems and building services to improve operations

During the past decade, the complexity of building technology, HVAC processes, and automation systems has grown massively. Simultaneously the amount of associated data has exploded. This increased complexity has led to the neglect of HVAC system maintenance. As a result, energy consumption and poor indoor air quality have increased.

To respond to the challenge and the increased complexity, new tools have emerged alongside the outdated SCADA system concept that allows the HVAC process, indoor climate, and energy consumption to be monitored automatically and thoroughly.

At Nuuka, we have set out to solve the challenge of continuous monitoring of building services by developing a fully autonomous diagnostic application for energy systems, automation systems, and building services. This application can diagnose and identify deviations and interferences in building services and processes. We have used our extensive experience from monitoring over thousand HVAC processes during the past years, and turned that experience into a wide set of algorithms and intelligence to identify the root cause of any potential malfunction or problem - and if a process or a device needs maintenance.

This fully autonomous and automated diagnostics will speed up fault detection, make it easier to repair faults at once, and enable maintenance personnel to participate in the development of maintenance processes. Diagnostics will also help to cover systems and services 24x7 instead of sporadic, intermittent inspections. Diagnostics will help move away from unnecessary preventive maintenance to proactive maintenance, where real-time data is used to identify faulty devices, no matter the size or complexity.

The benefits of digitalized energy systems and building services

• The operation of building technology can be continuously optimized, which leads to the desired indoor air conditions with optimal energy efficiency and cost savings
• Cover full 100% calendar time with diagnostics, instead of covering less than 1% of the time with manual inspections
• Reduced amount of expert work required to ensure operations will be reduced, resulting in cost savings
• Increased ability to respond to maintenance emergencies and solve building problems
• The expertise and knowledge of the real estate teams (management, experts, and maintenance) about the operation of the building will increase, the flow of information will become transparent and more efficient
• Property development, PTS plans, and investments can be made with higher quality based on data from diagnostics