Your BACnet Questions, Answered – Episode 11
In this episode, we’re focusing on tips and recommendations for facility managers and team members who might not be BACnet experts and rely on partners to keep OT networks running.
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Here’s What Ping Covers in Episode 11:
- What kind of work can my facilities team do in-house?
- When is it time to call in my System Integrator?
- How do I know when my networks are “too big”?
- Tips on getting vendors to play nice together on big projects.
Transcript
Q1. Yeah, fantastic question. First of all, we often like to say that this industry has grown to accept mediocrity. And I think first of all, we should stop that. What does this mean is that you as a user, as an operator, as facility manager, as a technician, if you’re using a piece of software that comes with the building automation system, whether it’s a dashboard, whether it’s a graphic, an alarm panel, you shouldn’t accept mediocrity.
What I mean by that is if you click on a graphic and it takes more than a few seconds to load, this isn’t normal. If you know that you can’t do this action between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. because something won’t work, that’s not normal. If you know that if you click on that button three times, one time will work. If you’re lucky, that’s not normal.
Start with looking at the software that you are using and expect it to work all the time. And so it may not always be an OT network problem, but those ones that I mentioned- slowness, intermittent operations- those are pretty strong sign that a system is overloaded
And I’m not saying that the system shouldn’t be improved to not require you to be patient. But if you are in the process of improving the system, if your system integrators, your technicians, or team is in the process of improving the system, be patient with it. So if you’re loading a graphic, give it time to load. If you’re doing a discovery of devices,
Don’t press F5 and refresh and refresh and refresh. That is just adding strain to the system. And I think also second is understand that these systems as they grow will require different approach. So if you are the manager of a building that has grown significantly, give your team the opportunity to step back and look at what changes are required to now support the new grown system.
So, clear signs that system might require attention? One is slowness. And when I say slowness, let’s, let’s add to that comparable slowness. Normally it works really well, but once in a while it doesn’t. That sign of a bottleneck, a burst, an issue with the system. So again, slowness, and especially you can do comparable slowness between this approach and that approach, or this site and that site, that’s a good sign. And second is, if an action does work 90 % of the time, but not 10, then that’s a very clear sign that the system is supposed to work, but once in a while it doesn’t, and that’s typically a sign of a bottleneck and overloading of the system.
Q2. As a facility manager, as an operator of the building, if you have access to the engineering tools for your building automation system or systems, you can try to tackle it yourself. But that is the job of your system integrated partners. Of course, it will require a little guidance and you need to create space for them, an opportunity for them to look at improving the system.
And perhaps even collaborate with other system integrators. If you’re in a facility that has multiple partners, multiple contractors involved, create the opportunity for them to work together. But why not do it yourself? Again, first of all, it’s their job. Second of all, they have access to the tools. They have access to the knowledge. If you give them the opportunity to work on improving those systems, they should be pretty good partners to
I should mention we have several good articles, that talk about collaboration, collaboration between partners and end customers between partners. So check it out in our notes here. I think they’ll be very, valuable and let us know what you think.
Q3. I think one important thing to understand is that building automation was put in place for command and control: the room is too hot turn on the the cooling, if the room is too cold turn on the heating. It was a one-off command every once in while.
Building automation systems have grown significantly to support our ESG goals, our smart building programs. And now we’re layering on top of these building automation systems demand for more and more data. We expect a lot more out of it. I’m telling you this because it’s important to understand that a system that was designed for one purpose and then you migrate it, you transform it to fit in another purpose may require you to step back and change the infrastructure, change the underlying system to achieve these business goals.
So it’s okay to take a moment and say, I need to update my building automation system. I need to move from a serial communication to an IP-based communication. I need to upgrade these controllers that were designed to do one thing and they did them very, very well, but now we expect more out of them. So I think having in mind that the industry has evolved, but sometimes we expect that evolution to also apply to old systems. That’s not fair. And so to create that opportunity to make the update, and it’s just worth it, especially if your business goals are supporting your future, invest in it.
Q4. Let me put in a little plug, obviously, for what we do. Optigo Visual Networks does provide a network health score that is understandable by just about everyone. Work with your partners, ask your partners to apply Optigo Visual Networks from day one. Don’t wait for a problem to come up and then use it to find a problem. Use it from the beginning to keep your score in the green zone.
I think we have grown in the last few years to expect a lot of data. It’s one thing to be very, very cautious to create data just for the sake of creating data. You will get into trouble.
You go into these large backnet systems, these large building automation systems, and you say, I’m gonna collect every point every five seconds, you will choke the system. You will run out of storage room, you run out of CPU, you will create bottlenecks where you don’t expect them to be created. So I think it’s a balance between that future growth and knowing that there’s some data that it would be valuable for you to collect now that you can leverage in the future, but also balancing what you need now.
So don’t collect data more often than you need to, maybe slightly more, but not significantly more. By reducing that burden on system, you can create space and margin in your system to do other things. Second is bring in an IT partner from day one.
Q5. IP systems are quite complicated. Give them the opportunity to learn about BACnet, particularly about BBMD in particular. Learn about BBMD, learn about foreign device registration, depending on which vendor you use, the way that the BMS software connects to the sites, connects to the buildings may be slightly different. Bring the vendor in, help them understand so that they can collaborate on things like
the strategy around your your subnet range the strategy around your firewalls the strategy around how to divide up your VLANs. On that note I will mention one common approach is to break up per building a subnet per building It is not always adequate for building systems
In general, it is pretty good, but just keep in mind that a central plant does need to talk to everything. Therefore, that central plant needs to route to and from every building. So explain that to your IT experts. They may be able to provide a better approach. They may also be able to provide a routing method that is optimal for this case. Also keep in mind that in terms of bandwidth, in terms of burden, building automation system tend to be quite small compared to video conferencing and
big data analytics type of systems, but it’s still important to keep that in mind. And also with that, give them the opportunity to learn about your procedure and policies so that they can create an upgrade plan, a maintenance plan that fits your schedule and your priorities.
