Discover Your Building’s Intelligence for a More Efficient Condominium
At Catalyst, industry innovation drives us to continue improving how we support our condo property management clients. Part of this involves viewing condo buildings as an interconnected environment, identifying how to tie together building maintenance planning with capital planning efforts. The end goal? To help our clients better utilize their resources.
To support our condo clients with this proactive planning, we’ve partnered with Calgary-based company BiLD to implement their sensor technology to help condo boards better understand their buildings. In doing this, your condo board can proactively make connections between a building’s data, monitoring, and servicing ensuring that you’re maintaining what needs to be maintained while implementing cost savings and mitigating potential damage to your building (not to mention the headache of potentially displaced residents should something happen to your building).
Specifically, we’ve implemented BiLD’s vibration and temperature sensors on a number of our condo board’s buildings with the goal of automatically looking and analyzing the data these sensors collect to better inform clients as to the real needs of their building.
Vibration Sensors
Designed to work on rotating parts of a mechanical system within a building, such as motors and pumps, these sensors are used as an early predictor of failure within these specific parts. This mitigates greater risks and / or increased costs associated with a failed part. With these sensors, we’re able to compare when a remote monitoring system wants to call out a tradesperson versus what is currently built into your maintenance contract. This helps identify if the contract you’re currently on is truly bringing value to your building by making connections between the data. For example, it will indicate whether you’re building is having too many onsite servicing appointments or not enough.
These sensors will help you better understand the lifecycle of your mechanical system, ensuring that it’s maintained where it actually requires maintenance.
Temperature Sensor
BiLD designed this sensor to pre-emptively warn people prior to having a million-dollar problem. Similar to the motion sensor in terms of mitigating risk and costly repairs, the temperature sensor acts as an early warning system for potential freeze up and pipe bursts.
Why is this important to you?
You may live in your individual condo unit, however you are still connected to the ecosystem within the rest of the building. This means that while you may be responsible for turning off your water or ensuring that your unit’s heat doesn’t dip below a specific temperature during the middle of winter, avoiding harm to your pipes, there is no guarantee that your neighbours are as responsible.
Additional Sensor Benefits
While these sensors monitor different systems within a condo building, they both have similar benefits, including:
• Greater ability to predict failure, improving your reserve fund studies and capital planning,
• Providing insight and understanding of the intelligence within your building,
• The potential to reduce number of system service visits throughout the year (or combine with other routine maintenance appointments) to save on servicing costs,
• Cost savings by evaluation and monitoring the real health of your building equipment,
• Ease in understanding records without the need for a tech mind,
• Ability to compare your building’s health to that of similar ones, so you can better understand how your building functions with those in similar conditions, and
• Potential for lower insurance premiums. While not yet proven, as more data demonstrates the proactive risk mitigation and cost savings this type of technology offers, insurance companies may provide incentives for condo corporations who’ve invested in this type of technology.
While we’re still in the discovery phase with our clients as to what additional benefits may appear as a result of implementing these sensors to improve the building’s intelligence, we encourage you to start imagining the efficiencies your building can achieve when we begin to understand the data it provides daily!
Curious to learn more about BiLD and how their technology might benefit your condo building? Contact Catalyst today for an info gathering conversation!