The building cooling a meeting room nobody is in

The meeting room on the fourteenth floor is booked from one until five. Air conditioning runs at full output for four hours. Every light is on.

The meeting actually finished at half past two. Everyone left. Nobody released the booking, because it did not occur to anyone that they should.

This happens in every office building, every day, in several rooms at once, and it appears in no report at all — because the booking system says the room is in use.

The gap between booked and used

Booking data records intention. Occupancy data records what happened. The two differ by more than most people expect.

A building manager with only booking data concludes there are not enough meeting rooms and proposes building more. A manager with occupancy data usually finds large rooms booked for meetings of three, while the small rooms sit empty.

Those two remedies differ in cost by an order of magnitude.

The sensors worth the money

Occupancy sensors. Inexpensive, simple to fit, and immediately actionable: release a room automatically if nobody arrives within fifteen minutes, and stop conditioning it when it is empty.

Carbon dioxide sensors. They approximate how many people are present and report air quality, which lets fresh air volume follow actual occupancy rather than a fixed setting per square metre.

Sub-metering by zone. Metering the whole building tells you how much. Metering by zone tells you where, and when it is abnormal.

Making maintenance visible

The other half of facilities management is maintenance, which in many buildings still runs on phone calls and a logbook.

So nobody can say how many jobs were raised last month, which took longest, which asset keeps failing, or which tenant waits longest on average.

A maintenance request system tenants can use from their own phone, with a status they can see, is not new technology. It changes the tenant relationship more than expected, because what irritates people is rarely the wait. It is waiting without knowing how long.

A caution about sensors and people

Sensors in a workplace walk into monitoring staff very easily.

Knowing whether a room is occupied and knowing who sat at which desk for how long are entirely different things. Buildings that fit desk-level sensors without saying clearly what they are doing meet resistance stronger than anyone predicted, and usually end up removing them.

The safe path is to collect at the level of space rather than the individual, and to say plainly at the outset what is collected and what is not.

Start with one floor

One floor, occupancy sensors in every meeting room, and sub-metering for that floor. One month of data.

What it shows is usually enough to pay for equipping the whole building — and, more usefully, it moves the conversation from opinion to evidence.

What GIPSIC does here

We build smart office systems, space booking, and tenant management platforms — three things that in practice should be one system, because booking, use and billing are a single subject as far as a tenant is concerned.

We design our own hardware, write our own firmware, and have our own installation teams, so the whole line from a sensor in the ceiling to the building manager's screen sits with one team.

If you would like to talk about your building, get in touch.