IN MOST buildings, power and communications still depend on a complex lattice of copper wires threaded throughout the structure. Each one of perhaps hundreds of thousands of individual cables has to be routed and attached at either end by a human hand. The cost in materials, time and potential error is vast.
Consider just one sector in the UK, the food retail industry. How many tonnes of copper are used, and how many millions of miles of wire are required for the hard-wired control and monitoring systems currently in use across the country? Think of the supermarkets, the cold stores, the cold chain underpinning their operations.

In contrast, wireless control systems communicate with plant via highly reliable radio transmitters and receivers. They do not require disturbance to the fabric of a building, and are quick to install and configure.

The savings associated with wireless versus traditional point to point wiring include material - wire, junction boxes, cable trays, conduit, racks and power supplies - plus design, procurement and installation labour.

The saving in materials alone can be substantial, given the amount of copper required in traditional systems. The price of copper has more than doubled over the past year, from around £3000 a tonne in January to more than £6000 a tonne today. This trend is likely to increase in future, adding further costs to traditionally hard-wired projects.

Faster installation

Another significant benefit is speed of installation. On-site wiring installation is pressured and detailed; installation takes place in a relatively narrow window during which other work on a project may be on hold. The bottleneck this creates costs time and money. With pressure to reduce building costs, it is an obvious area for savings.

There is a strong trend across the construction industry towards offsite, pre-fabricated solutions. Whereas in the past, a remote cooling system would be built virtually from scratch onsite, today modular chillers and complete plant rooms are delivered to site and simply craned in and connected up.

The same drivers are at work in control and monitoring. A modular wireless control and monitoring system comes factory tested. It is delivered to site as a proven system and does not rely on anywhere near the same scale of dedicated manpower for installation.

In the age of skilled manpower shortages and ever more onerous health and safety regulations onsite, reducing dependence on onsite trades is not only sensible but essential.

Another major benefit of wireless systems is flexibility. The problem with hard-wiring is that it is just that, hard, and therefore fixed. This can make changing a building's lay-out time-consuming and expensive, as existing systems must be rerouted to cater for the revised floor-plan and new equipment.

With wireless systems, changes to a store format can be quickly and inexpensively implemented.

Lay-out changes

It gives retailers and building managers the ability to experiment with changes to lay-out, and rapidly reconfigure the control system to match. Retailing today is highly competitive and end users are constantly on the look-out for an advantage over rivals, as well as seeking to maximise returns per unit area of retail space. The ability to rapidly reconfigure a store confers a major advantage.

The flexibility issue comes to the fore if a store or building is extended or refurbished. Due to competitive pressures, buildings are being updated or extended more frequently. A wireless system is easily expanded to accommodate the addition of more and different kinds of plant, again reducing costs and installation time.

A few short years ago, if you wanted a network of PCs in your building, the only option was hard-wired communications.

Today, wireless systems are rapidly taking over, due to their speed, low-cost and flexibility. More than half the homes with high speed broadband have wireless hubs handling the flows of data that pour into our homes. They work, are reliable and can easily accommodate expansion.

With industry standards converging, and reliability now proven, we see a bright future for wireless control and monitoring.

If we are to deliver the low cost, fast-track, environmentally sustainable buildings we need for the future, wireless control has to be a vital part of the package.

RDM
0141 810 2828