Leveraging RESET® for Healthy and Sustainable Buildings

In our introductory session of this three-part webinar series, Switch Automation Chief Operating Officer Derek Harnett and RESET® President Stanton Wong engage in a panel discussion on using the RESET data standard for measuring indoor air quality.

We have outlined some of our key takeaways below—read on or access the full session here:

Webinar Access

We can survive weeks without food, days without water, but we can only survive for a few minutes without air.

Conditioning our Indoor Air Quality (IAQ)

We spend an average of 90% of our day within an indoor environment and breathe around 15,000 liters of air daily. Hence, the air quality we breathe must be of a good standard. 

Switching away from a checklist and schedule-based operation and maintenance, you can bring a building into a state of continuous commissioning with energy and air quality optimization.

What is RESET®?

RESET® is a data standard. Rather than a traditional building standard, the focus is on data and data collection to monitor the space and have the highest quality data.

Data collection consists of a present, past, and future. Operations are the present: You can look at how a building is operating right now. For continuous data collection, you refer to the past, and having the data allows you to see how it’s performed historically. You can create actionable plans and optimize the solutions that you’re planning to implement in the future.

You cannot effectively solve what you cannot measure.

Harnessing data to futureproof your smart buildings

RESET aims to help built environments become healthier and more sustainable, and the methodology is through data collection and continuous monitoring.

Data can be broken down into three pieces:

Completeness: How much data are you collecting? With continuous monitoring, we have to make sure the data is all there

Quality: Is the data representative of what you’re looking for? 

Performance: How well is the space performing? What does the data say?

The goal is to ensure the data is trusted, actionable, and relevant to the built environment. RESET Air presents a structure for monitoring space for the highest quality data to optimize indoor air quality with scientific, accurate, and actionable information. As a data standard, RESET allows for minimizing viral transmission in the air.

The goal of the RESET air standard is to see the invisible.

Implementing RESET into the Switch Platform

The goal of Switch is to make every building smart. This includes buildings that may not necessarily be brand new and equip them with a level of building intelligence—which means harnessing the power of a modern building and all the data it contains to bring them up to a more advanced standard. The more efficient buildings are, the more informed we can make the owners of the buildings.

Leveraging existing data – In order to guide the designing construction of buildings and make them as efficient as they can be, data is everything. Besides building automation systems, there are various areas of control to bring together disparate levels of data into a single, comprehensive platform—from tenancy, occupant comfort platforms, access control platforms, meeting room booking systems, and even down to the Wi-Fi systems.

Automate the process –  Harnessing the data from different systems and across different equipment groups into our logic libraries allows for immediate FDD or fault detection and diagnostics.

Normalizing data across portfolios – Switch brings all the data together. If there are multiple building portfolios, regardless of the building control system or the age of the building, we can normalize the data in an intuitive, concise, and cohesive manner.

Understanding building performance – With access to data, owners and building operators are able to assess and optimize buildings that may require more attention or determine the ones that are high-performing.

Holistic approach to IAQ – Air quality metrics can be managed seamlessly in your building operations. The benchmarks for indoor air quality are determined depending on the region of the world. With more extreme weather events such as wildfires or hazes, these external climates challenge traditional HVAC systems and air conditioning systems are not optimized to cope with heavier particulate or the heat loads. Buildings owners have to adapt to these requirements through data-driven and science-based decisions.

Long-term value of continuous data monitoring – Data is collected for monitoring every five minutes. From the auditing perspective, the data average is calculated over a 30-minute period, which allows for optimal data specificity for shorter time periods. If a building is in an area with low ambient air quality, owners or operators are not subjected to drive their ESG goals to a high standard. Hence, this pragmatic approach means that regardless of the environment your buildings are distributed across the world, you can achieve some level of a RESET certification.

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