The Challenge

To upgrade a ten-year-old lighting and radiator control system that controls 130 lights and 130 radiators.  This system used Lon Works IO Modules controlled by out of date proprietary logic controllers.

Problems with this existing legacy system

The customer was unable to modify occupancy timers in the individual rooms to suit the requirements of the room occupants.  Occupancy timers were manually set and unable to be adjusted through the BMS (Building Management System) causing lights to switch off while the rooms were occupied.

Customer subject to vendor lock in and unable to find alternative service company to maintain system to allow competitive pricing and service.

The Solution

Potter Building Services Ltd installed four iLON Smart Servers running custom lighting and radiator FPM applications to control the existing Lon Works IO modules. The four iLON Smart Servers replaced 10 of the proprietary logic controllers that were installed.

We implemented separate occupancy timers for the lights and the radiators and separate occupied and unoccupied temperature set points for every radiator allowing the operator to control every radiator and light separately.

Key Benefits

• No Vendor lock in Allows the system to be scalable and new parts from multiple vendors installed when parts fail
  
  
• Scalability Because the iLON Smart Server can run 10 FPM applications at the same time it can control 160 different IO modules.  The existing legacy logic controllers could only control 16 different IO modules per controller.
  
  
• Cost effective iLON Smart Server combined with the FPM applications is half the cost of just one of the existing proprietary controllers and can control 9 times the number of IO modules.
  
  
• Extra functionality with temperature set points and occupancy timers for every room.