When I was in high school, I worked a weekend shift at a T-shirt screen printing company. For eight hours on Saturdays, I filed paperwork in the front office while the printers in the back of the building worked feverishly to catch up before the next rush of orders on Monday. T-shirts flew everywhere, everyone yelled and hustled, and there was a defining racket of machinery until about two hours before I had to leave. Then, there was silence. When I left, it was my job to walk all the way through the quiet building and turn off every?…single?…?light. If only the company had lighting automation to both a) turn off the lights in the back once the printers left for the day (cost savings) and b) enable someone to turn off the lights all at once (efficiency). Today’s systems not only create energy savings and efficiency, but they do it with a high level of sophistication. Lighting automation (covered in “The First Automation Frontier: Lighting Control” on page 103) is considered a good way to enter the world of building automation systems (BAS), the topic of this month’s cover story, “Do the Math: Why and How Integrators Can Succeed in Building Automation” on page 58.
The U.S. market for building automation equipment is set to grow by more than 40 percent within a five-year period ending in 2017, spurred by the need in commercial buildings for more efficient energy consumption, according to a report from IHS Inc. released in late 2013, and is a “must watch” growth opportunity for integrators.