Building Insights: The Data You Need from Your Buildings
Wednesday, 1st June 2022
Thanks to the growth of IoT technologies and artificial intelligence solutions, intelligent buildings are on the rise. In fact, data suggests that the global market for building intelligence will almost double in the next five years.
At Infogrid, we’re happy that our smart, connected systems are helping organisations, landlords, and facilities managers (FMs) get more from their buildings. Because by accessing more sophisticated insights into building health and efficiency, you can reduce your carbon footprint, meet your ESG goals, and make your sites more comfortable and productive for employees.
In this article, we want to show you what sort of building insights you can receive with Infogrid. And we’ll explore how you can use the world’s smartest IoT sensors to help create a better building environment for your employees, the planet, and your bottom line.
For example, we helped one retail chain save $1.6 million on energy costs in one year alone—and reduced their carbon emissions by 800 tonnes.
We can help you do the same.
Why you need building insights
Before we introduce you to Infogrid’s solutions, let’s talk about the sort of benefits smart building insights can bring—for the teams in your office as well as your customers, investors, and the planet.
Achieve greater sustainability. Studies suggest that the built environment is responsible for 40% of all carbon emissions. That means that if we’re committed to building a more sustainable world, the change has to start here. Getting information on your building’s carbon footprint, energy usage, and waste can help you make steps to achieve net zero.
Boost your ESG score. Environmental, social, and governance—or ESG—might be the buzzword of the moment, but it’s a lot more than that. Rather, it refers to the crucial metrics that investors and stakeholders use to understand a business’s wider social and environmental footprint. As part of this, reporting on your building performance can help you secure investment, attract talent, and build a larger customer base.
Reduce facilities management costs. Equipped with data from building insights, you can optimise the building management processes that will have an impact on your bottom line. Reduce labour hours on things like cleaning, save on building downtime with preventative maintenance, and get valuable insight into security and air quality.
Drive employee comfort. Building insights can be put to use to ensure optimal temperatures, indoor climate, and air quality for the people who use your buildings. Data suggests that uncomfortable temperatures can reduce productivity by as much as 10%.
Similarly, Infogrid research conducted for our Hybrid Workplace report found that indoor climate has a direct impact on employee mental health.
Ensure compliance. Increasingly, businesses are required to report regularly on their ESG performance. To do this properly—with validated, error-free data you can trust—you need a system to collect insights into your building performance.
At Infogrid, we can ensure that the data on which you are reporting is correct and clearly formatted. Explore our use cases to find out how we can help.
What sorts of insights can you obtain into your building?
So far, we’ve discussed the value of your building insights in general. But what specific insights can you receive from your buildings?
Here are just some of the tools you can use to better understand your buildings.
Indoor air quality (IAQ) monitoring. One of the most urgent insights you should be receiving from your building regards air quality. In the post-COVID environment, it’s no longer just a nice to have. Rather, with new regulations in the UK, and in other states such as the Netherlands, demanding businesses monitor IAQ, it’s now a must.
At Infogrid, we can help you to deploy smart IAQ sensors across your offices and buildings. By tracking CO2, VOCs, particulate matter, humidity, and more, you can improve employee wellbeing and keep viral risk low.
Heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC). HVAC systems use as much as 40% of your building’s energy. But getting insights into how the system works can help you reduce your carbon footprint, save costs, and maintain a pleasant working environment.
Pipe monitoring. Smart building insights give FMs the opportunity to save on manual pipe monitoring. Smart sensors like those from Infogrid can be deployed on pipe systems to monitor water flow, temperature, and the risk of bacteria infestations such as legionella.
When you’re obliged to report on these conditions regularly, the results of this data can be huge. To give just a single example, with our pipe monitoring system, we helped one company reduce their labour hours on compliance by 81%.
Occupancy and security. Building insights offer you visibility not just on the physical environment itself, but also on the people that use it. With footfall monitors and door and window sensors, you can receive real-time data on how many people are using the building.
This data can be overlaid with IAQ or HVAC data so you can create an optimal indoor environment based on usage patterns. Or you can put it to use to monitor building security too.
Smart cleaning. Similarly, insights into building cleanliness can be used to optimise the space of your buildings. With usage sensors and user feedback panels, you can track usage patterns and customer experience—to ensure you focus your cleaning efforts to where they are needed.
Energy use. In a world increasingly focused on environmental sustainability, your building insights would be incomplete without visibility on your building’s energy performance. We can help you access that data too, by collecting building-level information on electricity usage and more.
How to receive building insights with Infogrid
Infogrid’s solutions make the collection of smart building insights easy. By combining IoT sensors with our proprietary artificial system, we can bring disparate data on your buildings together all in one place.
Here’s how:
IoT sensor deployment. Our system starts with IoT sensors that can be deployed anywhere throughout your building. Whether you want insights into air quality or pipe health, occupancy or cleanliness, these smart, discreet, and zero-maintenance sensors make that simple.
AI system. Our proprietary AI process turns raw building data into actionable insights.
Data dashboard. You can access all of the data on your buildings wherever you are, thanks to our intuitive smart hub. Receive alerts on your building health in real time, so you can improve your performance today.
How you can improve your building performance
Armed with your building insights, put steps in place to improve. Here’s how we’ve helped others in the past.
Thanks to Infogrid’s HVAC monitoring, we helped one retail store reduce their carbon emissions by 800 tonnes a year.
We enabled one bank to save $1 million a year on their water bill
We helped an analytics company reduce viral risk in the workplace by 80%
Our pipe monitoring system cut labour time on compliance by 81%.
We can help you too. Get smarter insights into your building with Infogrid.
