Healthier Building Control

Imagine that you are the facilities manager of a two-floor, 29,000 sq. ft. building with 88 rooms and no monitoring system. Every morning you check the weather forecast and adjust the temperature accordingly. Sounds like fun, doesn't it? That was the situation facing a Chicago health clinic. The clinic needed to monitor air temperature and energy usage but couldn't install a wired system because of building codes and the steep cost involved.



The clinic contacted TENG (www.teng.com), a company specializing in design and construction management services who, in turn, teamed up with Dust Networks, a company specializing in wireless mesh networking, and Tridium Inc., creator of software to integrate diverse systems and devices (www.tridium.com).

Dust Networks provided the SmartMesh components for the wireless sensor network, consisting of 41 temperature sensors and five current sensors, while Tridium's Niagara software allowed real-time control from a standard Web browser. According to Fran Donohue, operations manager for TENG, "With a wireless mesh network, deploying an air temperature monitoring solution was easy. It would have taken my team four man weeks to install those 46 nodes using a wired solution, but with SmartMesh it took us less than two hours."

Contact Dust Networks, Hayward, CA; 866-289-3878, [email protected], www.dustnetworks.com.