Events2HVAC is spreading beyond the education and church markets. We now have our first installation at a major convention center, the Kansas City Convention Center in Kansas City, MO.
“Like Phil Robertson, I’m happy, happy, happy!” (Joel Llorente)
Joel Llorente, the on-site Johnson Controls facility manager, went from spending 20 hours per week scheduling HVAC and lighting systems to two hours per week. He said in a recent phone conversation, “Like Phil Robertson, I’m happy, happy, happy!”
The Kansas City Convention Center uses Johnson Controls Metasys® controls, and Streamside Solutions worked closely with Johnson Controls to implement this Events2HVAC integration. Events2HVAC is now controlling HVAC and lighting in 172 rooms in several buildings at the convention center, including the Municipal Auditorium, Grand Ballroom, Conference Center, and Bartle Hall. Events2HVAC sends commands to 150 air handlers covering 800,000 square feet of building space.
This Events2HVAC integration is special not only because it is our first convention center, but also because we developed a custom integration based on the customer’s specifications. The convention center uses Ungerboeck Software for event scheduling, so we had to develop a new event provider interface. But the customer also had some specific requirements for that interface to function differently from all of our other Events2HVAC interfaces.
One of the unique features of the custom event provider interface is lighting control that adjust lights according to the function of each scheduled event. For example, one conference might have several functions like “move-in,” “setup,” “show,” and “move-out.” So we had to accommodate that work flow which is different from the typical “setup,” “main event,” and “teardown” functions used by other reservation systems. We also had to permit the customer to set various percent levels for lighting depending on the event function. For example, the lighting might be set at 50% for move-in, 100% for show, and 25% for move-out.
Another unusual request from the customer was to make the scheduling process manual. The customer wanted to make sure that a human approves the schedules and imports them into Events2HVAC. Though this seems counter-productive to the goal of automation, we were able to satisfy the customer requirements.