All of us at BuildingIQ hope you and your loved ones are safe and healthy. We’re all living unprecedented times due to the Coronavirus outbreak.  As with many of our clients, our teams are under mandatory shelter-in-place order in various locations in the USA. While Australia hasn’t issued such an order, most of our colleagues there have been advised to work from home. 

We are being extra diligent in helping you, our clients, during these difficult and unique times. For many, the shelter-in-place order came quickly and unexpectedly. Most people did not have the chance to prepare and/or adjust to the new circumstances, such as:

1. Reduced building occupancy
2. Change in the general use of their facility, and
3. Limited onsite facilities staff. 

Cloud-based oversight may never be as important as it is now in these challenging times. For example, our team of building engineers has been working with several clients –including universities in the New England region that have transitioned to distance learning– looking at the large mechanical equipment to make sure they are operating at both reduced hours and reduced load. Because the onsite staff was given such short notice, they were not able to make these changes. But we have been able to adjust the settings of each building and change their operating hours and sequencing remotely. Furthermore, we continue to monitor their buildings and those of other clients who are in a similar situation, looking for potential system failures and normal operations in the absence of typical usage, and alerting the building operators of any issues that may require a closer inspection. Simply put, we’re operating as cloud-based facilities managers. 

In contrast, buildings not equipped with cloud-based monitoring solutions, such as those on standard pneumatics, require a facilities team member to manually make these needed changes or risk wasting money by cooling/heating empty buildings. In the current circumstances, this is less than ideal. 

We’re looking forward to having things go back to normal soon, but in the meantime, we’re glad we are able to provide this service to our customers and hopefully deliver some badly needed peace of mind as well.

Stay well. 

Steve Nguyen is VP of Product and Marketing at BuildingIQ. He loves products and ideas that transform markets or society. Whether they are transformative in and of themselves, or because they are enablers. He’s driven by creating the stories, teams, and strategy that make these agents successful.