An IoT-Based Building Management System (BMS) – Lessons from the Korean Market

Daliworks recently had the opportunity to take part in several interesting smart building projects in Korea. These buildings were BMS projects looking to adopt IoT services. 

In Korea, older buildings (especially small and mid-sized ones) commonly have no built-in building management, control, or automation systems. 

Today nearly every building is managed manually. Problems inside the building go undiscovered until a tenant complains loudly. And there is no way to know, day by day, how the money spent maintaining the building is used across energy, electricity, ventilation, and other building management categories.

Building owners and managers do not really know how their building management costs break down

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A system air conditioner commonly found in buildings

Most buildings in Korea regulate indoor temperature through independently operated heating and cooling units. The units can be adjusted with an IR remote.
Building owners and managers know nothing about real-time indoor electricity use, or temperature data.
A heating/cooling unit is like a black box. 1 time a month or so, you find out how much electricity it used.
But with indiscriminate air-conditioner use, there is no way to know how much energy is being wasted, whether the room is running too hot or too cold, or how much waste comes from overheated or overcooled space.
Even in a small office, we often see the temperature measured by the room thermostat differ from what the people in the office actually feel.

With a single air conditioner running in the office, the temperature measured right next to the unit and the temperature at the desks differ by about 7~8 degrees.
(Left) Office temperature measured right next to the air conditioner (Right) Temperatures measured at two desks in the office

A five-story building often spends millions of won every month on electricity/energy. The main reason: occupants keep the heating and cooling running to hold a comfortable indoor temperature.  

There are a great many ways to centralize and digitalize these heating and cooling units to improve their efficiency and utilization.

In the past, Korean building standards were very low. Inefficient installation was taken for granted, especially in insulation requirements (previously, instead of 10cm insulation, a bare-minimum 5cm was typically used); cheap windows were common, and many buildings were designed with no thought given to entrance and door placement or insulation.  

An old apartment building in Seoul; the structural damage to the exterior walls is clearly visible.

The most serious insulation-related problem is damage to building walls caused by rapid temperature swings. Structural damage of this kind can mean major costs for the building owner down the road. Moreover, indoor temperature fluctuations caused by poor insulation translate directly into wasted heating and cooling costs and grow into difficulty keeping other aspects of the indoor environment stable.
Large swings in indoor temperature also directly affect the comfort, focus, and productivity of the people working in the office.

Office temperature and employee productivity are linked.

In Korea, rent for many buildings is typically a fixed monthly fee with electricity, heating, and cooling costs all bundled in. Tenants therefore have no incentive to save energy and give little thought to measures that head off excessive use (like switching off the HVAC or computers when leaving for the day) before it happens.
Sometimes tenants are billed separately for electricity or heating and cooling, with the building’s total HVAC cost split evenly or divided by floor area. Even then, as before, no individual tenant has any incentive to work at cutting heating and cooling costs. 

So the energy-saving effort that owners and managers hope to see from tenants never materializes. And in summer and winter, when heating and cooling costs run especially high, tenants complain to the landlord or building manager about the extra energy charges on their bills. A building management/control system that can neither reduce those high HVAC costs tenant by tenant nor show each tenant’s usage cannot resolve these complaints.

Another frequent problem in older buildings is water leakage and the damage it causes. Some data puts the cost of leaks and leak damage at 30-50% of a building’s total maintenance costs. By the time a leak floods a floor, the leakage has usually been progressing for quite some time. Only once a certain amount of leakage has occurred do occupants actually see it. 

A building leak gets addressed only when a tenant reports it to the building manager or the maintenance team finds it during a routine building check/inspection. 

When leaks accumulate, this is the result.

For older small and mid-sized buildings(up to about 15 stories is generally called mid-sized), adopting a system that could solve the problems above was, until recently, impractical. 
The building management and maintenance system market is deeply conservative. It is relatively slow to take up new technology. Adoption is expensive, and installation is complex and demands a long timeline (usually several months) to complete. For a building owner, investing in such a costly building management system (Building Management System) is highly uncertain, and the return in improved building profitability is murky at best.

 
For a building owner, maximizing profit per pyeong is the KPI that matters, and there is often fundamental doubt that installing a very expensive building management system is the way to improve it. For this reason, traditional BMS adoption is an unrealistic option for more than 90% of buildings in Korea.

Over the past three years, technologies capable of solving the problems above have been developed, and applying them no longer requires major equipment purchases, installation costs, or a complicated install process.  Two years ago, we would not have dared give a definite answer to this question; today we can answer with confidence.

The biggest obstacle to solving these problems has been connectivity. Until recently, digitizing data from the physical world, securing it, and transmitting it to a central control system was genuinely difficult. Wi-Fi and other short-range network equipment have long been used, but they never became the optimal solution. The biggest contributor to the recent arrival of ultra-low-cost, easy-to-install solutions is LPWAN (Lower-Powered, Wide Area Network) technology. LoRa WAN, SigFox, and NB-IoT networks are examples.

Devices built on Low Powered WAN (wide area network) coverage technology can run for years on a single battery.

These LPWAN technologies must deliver maximum range, overcome building obstruction, and pass through walls and floors. Most important of all, Ultra Low power consumption must be possible — that is what lets a control system run for years once a battery is attached.

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Along with connectivity, the other problem solved was cost-effectiveness.

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As noted above, excessive system costs and the resulting doubts about return on investment have been a major drag on traditional BMS adoption.  LPWA network technology was developed precisely to solve this cost problem, making it possible to build and deliver solutions at very low cost. (In some cases, down to less than 1/5 of previous costs.)

The cost of producing the necessary hardware components, modules, and sensors has plummeted alongside mass smartphone production. And AI/machine learning — the capability to analyze and predict from large volumes of data — has advanced rapidly as well, so applications can now analyze all kinds of building data and predict a wide range of building issues at low cost.

Devices with modules like these simply need to be installed in the building, and they cost very little.

Another advance: central control systems that collect, monitor, and control data through various devices (smartphones, tablets, PCs) and sensors used to be expensive, closed-architecture systems — but cloud-based platforms have now solved that problem.  Dedicated IoT platforms such as Daliworks’ Thing+, along with Amazon, Google, and various open-source platforms, can now be deployed in a public or private cloud.

One example of a smart building solution built on the Thing+ IoT platform. Every device can be controlled, monitored, and automated centrally, at a glance.

So how does IoT technology make light work of the building management problems described above?

The heating/cooling control issue – solved!
We will explain in more detail as we roll out the actual service. For now, here is a brief look at how we solved it.

As noted above, what matters most in HVAC control is data access and  remote, automatic control.  The data access problem is solved in the following two steps.

1. Indoor temperature: very lightweight sensors measuring temperature/humidity/ and in some cases VOC (air quality) are placed throughout the rooms to measure the indoor space as a whole.

Installing lightweight data-collection devices has become very easy.

2. HVAC usage data is collected through the electrical wiring system connected to the units

It connects directly to the electrical conduit. No more complicated wiring work.

The control issue is solved by attaching a light IR (or other wireless network technology) transmitter to the HVAC system. Heating and cooling can be adjusted directly, and because control is implemented in the cloud, it can be adjusted from any device (smartphone, tablet, PC).

A small device controlling the A/C – wired hookups are no longer needed.

Simply put, real-time sensor readings of airflow from the A/C and heaters and various other environmental influences are combined with the sun’s azimuth and the weather outside the building (pulled directly from open weather APIs), and continuous control adjustments keep indoor temperature/humidity at their optimum.

On top of this, by collecting and analyzing actual electricity usage data, building managers themselves can optimize the building’s billing and operations.

Daliworks engineers are not insulation experts.

Our engineering team has no experience or know-how in developing or producing insulation. But we know very well how to relieve much of the insulation problem.

Wall damage detection
The long-range, wall-penetrating devices mentioned earlier can measure deformation and load in the building’s walls. They catch the issues that create internal structural problems before those problems grow into major accidents or repairs requiring heavy spending.  Once internal wall problems become serious, they demand repair or complete reconstruction. That work is expensive. Far better to detect such problems in advance and fix them the moment they are predicted.

A sensor measuring load on a wall

Reducing wasted energy
With the temperature and humidity sensors described earlier installed throughout the building, managers can now address insulation issues and unstable indoor temperatures. They can detect a door left open, or a draft slipping in at the corner of a window. At times, alerts that the A/C has been left running or a door left open deliver substantial savings on energy costs.

Reducing indoor temperature swings
This is achieved by collecting indoor and outdoor environmental data throughout the space and automatically controlling the HVAC system accordingly. Indoors, after the HVAC kicks in, it takes a while for the room to feel comfortable  — a time lag occurs. Our solution calculates this time lag and adjusts heating and cooling around it. That largely eliminates over-cooling and over-heating and resolves the problems described above — walls damaged by wide indoor temperature swings, and shortened HVAC equipment life.

All kinds of data on the building’s structure and environment become directly visible to the landlord, and tenants and landlord alike can see the source and amount of every building management cost.

Building owners/tenants are protected from losses caused by carelessness or wasted energy. Automation and the rich big data gathered from sensors of every kind keep such losses to a minimum.

Landlords, receiving energy usage information directly, gain the ability to control it. And when negotiating lease terms with tenants, transparent building management information removes the information asymmetry, letting both sides reach more constructive, productive outcomes.

Leak sensors with open-technology-based Low Powered Wide Area Network coverage keep arriving on the market.  These multi-line devices run for years on a single battery, cost little, and can be installed anywhere leaks occur. Installation is simple too. Once installed, if a leak occurs, an automatic alert goes straight to the designated building manager.

Leak detection sensors are extremely sensitive, catching even the slightest moisture instantly.

Korea has countless buildings living with the problems described above. Solving them takes a great deal of data and automatic control. In many cases, bringing in an expensive new system to fix them is an uneconomical solution. Instead, we strongly recommend that building tenants, managers, and landlords alike consider a cost-effective wireless IoT service — a solution that installs lightly and easily. With advancing technology, building management systems are now changing fast, and we encourage you to consider a solution built on IoT.