Integrated contol
April 1st 2007

The Archbishop Ryan School in Dublin uses a Priva BMS to control the bulding's operation where it has achieved an energy performance that is twice as good as that of a school constructed to meet the good practice energy targets outlined in CIBSE Guide F

When Temperature Control Systems was invited to tender for a building management system (BMS) in an Irish school, it found itself involved in a whole new way of educational construction. The Archbishop Ryan School in Dublin is the prototype of a generic school design that provides an eight, 12 or 16- classroom building, in accordance with the technical guidance documents laid down by the Irish Department of Education and Science. The complete package has been developed to tender stage resulting in savings in design time and cost.

Working closely with the M&E engineers, Building Design Partnership (BDP) in Dublin, Temperature Control Systems,who were responsible for the design, panel manufacture and commissioning of the BMS, chose to use a PRIVA Building Intelligence system. "Managing the HVAC services was a straightforward proposition," said Charlie Carson, managing director of Temperature Control Systems,"the exceptional aspect of the project is the delivery, via the PRIVA BMS, of a wide range of data relating to building operation, which can be easily accessed by staff and students alike from a specially mounted touchscreen." Monitored energy results for the first year of the school's operation indicate that its energy performance is twice as good as that of a school constructed to meet the good practice energy targets outlined in CIBSE Guide F.

The first step in meeting these impressive energy targets was the design of the building to maximise useful passive solar gain, daylight and natural ventilation. The building was also air tested to meet a leakage target twice as good as that required under the current UK building regulations. The building systems and controls were optimised to reduce the energy consumption of the lighting and heating systems, with particular emphasis placed on a direct boiler weather compensation routine that maximises the fully modulating, condensing boilers' efficiency through direct control of its modulation.

Building management system: PRIVA Building Intelligence supplied a Compri HX8E controller complete with TC Select and XML. XML, which stands for eXtensible Markup Language, is a language system that allows information to be displayed in a structured manner. Because XML information is not just transferred, but also described in a way that makes monitoring easy, the recipient knows exactly what the data represents. TC Select is the PRIVA Top Control engineering application with hundreds of readymade control modules and graphic programming possibilities to install and maintain integrated systems.

Using PRIVA's web browser approach to building control,TC Select enables the school's headmaster to access information in an easy to understand web-based format from the PC on his desk. This web based approach uses the structured cabling of the school's IT network and removes the need to provide a dedicated and inflexible cabled front end. For example, meters record consumption of the buildings (mains gas, electricity and water supplies) and the PRIVA BMS allows them to be displayed not only on the Principal's PC, but on any PC within the school.

"Aware that staff at the Archbishop Ryan School and, for that matter, the staff of all future schools that will be constructed using the generic repeat design approach, are unlikely to have technical backgrounds we also produced an interactive,web-based manual and energy log book that compliments the web-based approach to building controls," said Chris Croly, building services engineering director of BDP.

For staff and students wanting to learn about the school's construction, energy conservation measures and monitor internal air quality conditions, a cartoon character called Energy Eddie is at hand on a dedicated wall-mounted touchscreen that has been placed in the school's main circulation area.

The students can extract a wide range of information about their school by simply interacting with the touchscreen. The data is supplied in a friendly format; for example, a water consumption figure may be illustrated in the number of baths full of water used.

More articles from Priva Building Intelligence Limited: