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Project Details
Founded in 1979, Seattle's Downtown Emergency Service Center (DESC) was established to offer emergency shelter and survival support for individuals experiencing chronic homelessness. Domatic was engaged through DESC and SDC Next Consulting for their low-voltage hub and controllers for lighting (occupancy controls, daylight harvesting, emergency egress), metering (power, water), and building monitoring (1500 devices monitored).
The project is at 303 Battery and Burbridge Place in Seattle, Washington where Domatic provided their products for two buildings totaling 108,524 square feet.
Objectives
Since this is a new approach to wiring, installing, commissioning, and maintaining a low-voltage smart building system, the objective was to ensure the team could deploy and maintain the solution as expected, and that the smart controls work in a full-scale building.
- Success means the solutions are deployed on time and within budget and the system works in a full-scale building with people living in it.
- Since the solution is still in its infancy, the cost of the hardware is high relative to where it will be at scale. However, it is more than offset by the savings on installation, commissioning, and maintenance.
- Savings on installation, commissioning, and maintenance should, in theory, offset the higher upfront cost.
Outcomes
While the installation time was comparable to traditional methods (due to the learning curve for both parties), the commissioning was performed in 95% less time.
- Maintenance cost benefits are still to be determined, but the team is already reporting early anomalous power and water usage behaviors from the tenants, which is already saving money on costly repairs.
“DESC is excited to continually be on the forefront of innovation and energy efficiency with a new type of building system that we believe will provide exceptional housing for a very vulnerable population with special needs.” Sondra Nielson, Director of Facilities & Asset Management, DESC
Next Steps & Future Use
The next steps include installing additional devices in the ecosystem (HVAC, shades, door access, speakers) to illustrate more breadth and get into more buildings for further data.
The next steps are installing more devices in the ecosystem (HVAC, shades, door access, speakers) to illustrate more breadth of control. Additionally, they hope to deploy the hubs and controllers into more buildings for more data, build partnerships with fixture manufacturers, and bring them into the open ecosystem of compatible fixtures for unified cross-brand control.
BuiltWorlds Analysis
The push toward more efficient buildings has become increasingly apparent, especially in urban hotspots where the most energy is consumed. More often than not, advanced energy systems and HVAC technology are implemented to automatically monitor and control building systems such that no unnecessary energy is used. Monitoring & Analytics and Heating/Cooling were the two highest-rated functionalities at 6.9 and 6.7 out of 10, respectively.