The Times Herald (Norristown, PA)
Tozour Smart Services Center maintains cutting edge of HVAC system analytics
UPPER MERION » From company headquarters in King of Prussia, Tozour Smart Services Center oversees the performances of hundreds of state-of-theart HVAC and building automation systems in the Philadelphia region and Southern New Jersey — including the Philadelphia 76ers Training Complex operation — but it goes well beyond what the mere “m” word can accomplish.
“The typical view of what we’re doing is that we’re monitoring and we specifically avoid that term, because monitoring is a small element of the total picture that we do,” noted Kevin Duffy, Tozour Energy Systems president. “Anybody can monitor for alarms, and that’s a valid system. But that’s a post-failure rather than a ‘prevent failure’ strategy. With our data analytics continuous performance measurement we take it a lot deeper. The Smart Center is a service where we’re connected to more than 500 buildings all around the area and we’re really changing the way we deliver our service to HVAC systems. The Smart Center room is a pretty busy place, with technicians and building operators calling in all the time,” Duffy said.
The logistics behind the Tozour Smart Center have been unfolding for more than a decade and are now at a point of being well ahead of their time, he allowed.
“We’ve just evolved continuously with technology connections and analytical tools and developed algorithms, and then we share them with partners, rewriting the algorithms to keep fine tuning them to write better reports for our clients,” Duffy said. “We can help the operators who are running the buildings with small problems they might be having as well as receiving alarms 24/7. But more importantly, we download and track a lot of operating data so we can help them make corrections and always run the system in an optimal way. When they’re running well they’re more reliable and use less energy.”
Tozour Energy Systems was founded in 1979 when Douglas Tozour purchased a Hartford, Conn. Trane franchise, starting off with 30 employees. In 1983, he sold the franchise back to Trane and purchased the Philadelphia Trane franchise, which now operates with a staff of nearly 200, distributing systems by Trane and other manufacturers and offering sustainability services, energy consulting, parts and supplies.
The company recently completed a joint venture with Mitsubishi Electric and Ingersoll Rand, the parent company of Trane, giving Tozour’s clients expanded options for ductless and variable refrigerant flow heating and air conditioning systems, whose continuing performance, of course, may be evaluated by data analytics measurements as well.
“Building analytic tools is just becoming popular,” Duffy said. “Trane, who we represent in the area, has been doing this for five years, but it was very rudimentary for a long time. Now we’re developing it into a very robust tool for our clients. If you’re a developer in the area and you’ve got six or eight buildings, we write comparative reports to see how each of them is running compared to the other, how much energy they’re using per square foot — key metrics they might be interested in applying so they can measure each building’s performance. More importantly,” he added, “when they see a trend going the wrong way we’re able to step in and come up with a strategy to help them improve it. If there is a failure we can back up the analytics … and instead of showing up and diagnosing and then going to find parts, we arrive ready with parts on order and have a pretty good sense of what’s going on.”
Those kinds of Smart Center shortcuts mean that a client will be back online much sooner, Duffy noted.
“The real value is that because of the data we’re collecting we’re able to predict failures because we see anomalies start to develop. So we can take a system down and make a preventive repair. Sometimes a reset on a fuse can be executed remotely, so we don’t even have to send a truck. I think just about any electronic piece of equipment, not just HVAC, is connected to the Internet for a similar strategy. We’re just a little ahead of those approaches.”
Building owners who are interested in high efficiency at a reduced cost are most receptive what the Smart Center can offer, Duffy said.
“Some developers don’t really care about it because they don’t pay the electric bills, but the smart ones trying to provide the best product to their tenants want their buildings to be running optimally. When you think of the big picture of greenhouse gases, closes to 50 percent of the total energy in the world is spent on operating buildings for HVAC systems,” Duffy added. “If you can trim 10 or 20 percent of your power use you’ve made a big dent in greenhouse gas. So we think this is tied to a much bigger mission too.”
For more information, visit Tozourenergy.com.