Energy Management System for Hotels
Challenges
A young company wanted to offer the hotel industry a system to optimize energy savings while maintaining the comfort of guests by automating the lighting, heating, and air conditioning of unoccupied rooms in their buildings. Such a solution provides dual benefits, as it generated savings in terms of power consumption while showing a genuine concern for the environment without compromising the comfort of guests. Since it was at the concept stage, the potential profitability for clients still had to be shown in real use.
The firm secured the services of Cysca for a proof of concept, followed by the production of its founding project. The company awarded Cysca a contract for a turnkey solution that included the needs analysis, the design of electrical equipment and software, prototyping and testing, to be able to offer hotels a complete, ready-to-install product with proven cost effectiveness.
Solutions
To address the question, the Cysca team began by applying a proven engineering methodology to collect data and define stakeholder needs.
The team then developed the hardware and software elements of the system: using integrated controllers was an obvious choice to collect data points, which were then transmitted via an ad hoc mesh network to the control application and management software. This way, high performance could be achieved without having to install complex hardware.
Once the design was set, Cysca turned to a 100-room test hotel for validation testing in a real-life environment, activating the energy-saving functions for half of the rooms. The team obtained a benchmark consumption level for rooms with and without the energy-saving system, from which it determined the savings achieved. The results were highly conclusive, and the company took over the mass production and marketing of its product.
Results
During testing, savings of over 25% were achieved, validating the potential profitability of the solutions for hotels. The solution soon found takers in many hotels across North America, successfully rivaling existing European and Asian solutions that featured fewer functions.
Furthermore, the flexibility of the design made it easy to adapt the solution to other types of commercial buildings, thus expanding the potential markets of the young company. Easy installation and the ability to eliminate sources of waste won over building managers of all kinds looking to enhance efficiency and expenditures.
Project Services and Industries
Systems Engineering
Electronic Design
Software Design
Systems Integration
Building Management
Mesh Networks