Dive Brief:
- Building controls startup FTL is offering facilities managers a way to oversee their building systems as if they have a full-fledged solution in place but without the upfront investment that a system like that typically requires.
- “If you’re not a skyscraper or a large manufacturing plant, you can’t afford to drop $10,000 or $15,000 for a controls solution,” Clayton Callander, president and co-founder of FTL, told Facilities Dive in an interview.
- Much of that installation cost is for the labor to lay cable, install the server and put in place other pieces to connect the solution to the organization’s network, Callandar says. FTL’s approach is to avoid those costs by offering a wireless solution that a technician can get up and running with little trouble. “If you’re instrumenting the solution for HVAC, all you need is an HVAC tech,” he said.
Dive Insight:
Callandar co-launched FTL in November after helping Impact Service Group, a nationwide HVAC services company, launch an HVAC monitoring system for clients.
The FTL system is more robust than what Impact offers, Callander says. Impact’s system is for monitoring. It uses sensors to let facilities managers know if an HVAC unit is having trouble and includes a platform for sending out work orders and then keeping tabs on the work that’s done. FTL does the same thing but also functions as a controls solution.
“Maybe I want the units to turn on at 6 in the morning,” Callander said. “I can also say, ‘I want to run cooling phase 1 for 20 minutes, cooling phase 2 for 20 minutes, and run diagnostics,’ and then it’ll provide a detailed report. The last thing it does is, it uses all this information to automatically generate work orders.”
The lion’s share of facilities managers — more than 85%, Callander claims — don’t have a controls solution in place but would have one if they could afford it, he said.
What Callander calls legacy solutions — systems offered by companies like Johnson Controls, Daikin and ABB — are probably more robust than what many facilities managers need, he said. If a facilities manager just wants to gain control over basic package units, splits or air handling units, a simpler controller will do the job, he said.
His company is working with a manager who oversees a small manufacturing facility. The company has a legacy control system in place for the manufacturing portion of the building but nothing for the adjacent offices — “just dumb thermostats on the walls,” Callander said.
FTL is installing its sensors in the office HVAC units and connecting the data from those and the legacy control system to the wireless platform, making both sides of the facility's operation visible on the FTL platform. “It’s not an ‘or,’ it’s an ‘and,’” he said of his company’s solution.
The company is working with almost 90 facilities to test its technology before it converts its solution to a paid version later this month. The facilities are mostly small or midsized businesses.
“We’re trialing a car wash, a few car dealerships, some warehouses [and] Class B and C office space,” he said. “We’re really targeting the 87% of buildings that don’t have a controls system.”
He touted the AI-assisted work order function as a time saver for facilities managers because it populates a form with data from the sensors and uses natural language to write the description.
“If there’s low cooling in this AC unit, we’ll use the historical data from that unit to draft a work order, and then you can just copy and paste that into ServiceChannel or whatever [computerized maintenance management system] you’re using,” said Callander. The order will likely be better written than if it were by someone who’s reporting a problem without fully understanding it, he said.
“A store manager who knows nothing about AC units and doesn’t have all of the data emails you that the store is hot,” he said. “You’re, like, ‘OK, what am I supposed to do with that?’ Or worse, there’s a leak coming from the ceiling. Is that a plumbing issue? Is that an AC issue? [The AI] will draft that work order. You can edit it if you want, but it’s handling the busy work so you can focus on what matters.”
Facility managers buy the hardware — the sensors that attach to the HVAC units and the controller — and pay a monthly subscription for the service, which gives facilities managers visibility into their units performance and a platform for managing work orders. The cost of the wireless connection is included in the fee structure. Pricing is based on the number of units being monitored, not on the number of people who have access to the system.
“As a facility manager, you want to be able to share this with whomever you want and not feel like you’re getting nickled and dimed by giving access to more people,” he said.
Launch of the paid version later this month is for HVAC systems; a refrigeration system is planned for an October launch and plumbing and electrical solutions are planned for later in the year.
“We’re starting with HVAC because it’s what I know best and it’s a very reactive, high-dollar system,” he said.
The technology uses an open protocol long-range wide area network, or LoRaWAN, for its wireless sensors and an open protocol bus system, 1-Wire, for its wired sensors. The open protocol networking enables facilities managers to add other sensors to their systems in many cases. “You can buy pretty much any off-the-shelf 1-Wire sensor and hook it up as long as it takes a sensing mode that we support, or any other type of sensor that we support,” said Callander, referring to deployment in a wired system.
One of the benefits of the wireless system is that it can be deployed without having to get the organization's IT department, which typically manages the LAN system, involved.
“We can support all three options [cellular, satellite and wired], but we find [wireless] helpful because no facilities manager wants to wait for their IT department to approve to connect us to their network,” he said.
It should take a technician about seven minutes to configure each sensor, he said. “And the technician can do it from their cellphone,” he said.
