Profile: Digital Europe Ltd

Honeywell
The importance of integration — Jonathon Lloyd, managing director of Digital Europe.

Digital Europe’s staff have been designing, installing and maintaining building automation for over 40 years. The company is based in Stourbridge, West Midlands, and the excellent web site gives a good indication of their wide range of capabilities associated with building controls.

A CentraLine Partner, Digital Europe has focused on four key areas that reflect its long experience of working with clients whose buildings and enterprise needs have become more exacting and demanding with the changes in technology and need for energy reduction.

Building-management systems

The design, engineering and application of successful building-management systems is a core requirement of an independent systems installer.

Digital Europe fully understands that its engineering staff are at the centre of delivering successful BMS solutions to their client base in the UK and throughout Europe.

This is demonstrated in a commitment to maintaining the expertise of software engineers trained to program the products and systems of leading control manufacturers — including CentraLine by Honeywell.

Energy-efficient software engineering is supported by high levels of commissioning skill and experience, probably the most critical aspect of successful BMS installation.

Digital Europe also provides annual servicing and maintenance of building-management systems for its wide portfolio of clients including schools, hospitals, hotels, commercial buildings and data centres.

Lighting-control systems

Digital Europe says that lighting consumes about 40% of the energy in a standard 4-storey office.

Lighting-control systems designed to match client’s specific applications deliver a wide spectrum of benefits — including integrated time control, presence detection, external light compensation and scene setting to provide ambience and enhanced working conditions.

The lighting-control system can be standalone or fully integrated with the building and energy management system.

Automatic energy monitoring and targeting

Independent system installers are ideal companies to provide automatic energy management and targeting (AT&M).

The engineering background required to understand and apply control technology is transferable to the technical requirements for the measurement and monitoring of energy usage.

Digital Europe provides the automatic collection and analysis of data to support customers in the identification of areas of high energy usage and corrective action to reduce consumption and hence costs.

AT&M can be fully integrated into new building-management systems or retrospectively applied to an existing building.

The integration of communication protocols used with the range of equipment and systems used in building services is of critical importance when interfacing with the meters and monitoring systems used in AT&M.

Digital Europe offers a range of AT&M products that are suitable for standalone or fully integrated with a new or existing BMS. This ensures that the company can offer customers products and software that are easy to use and understand whilst providing real-time data that can be analysed on software that does not require an annual fee.

Integration

The integration of products, systems and software is the underlining engineering capability that supports building-management systems, lighting control and AT&M

The level of integration in a building-management system is driven by the application complexity, and the clients environmental and enterprise requirements.

Training, experience and a good knowledge of open protocols is essential for the engineering of all integration solutions. BACnet, LON and Modbus are used extensively in building-management systems, DALI and KNX are applied to lighting control. M Bus is used for AM&T.

Open and propriety communication protocols are used in the system integration of fire, access, lighting and energy management, with high levels of graphical user interfacing needed for front end displays.

Digital Europe is also involved with enterprise-level integration where the occupier’s activity interfaces with the building services. One example is hotels, where the booking system is integrated with the heating, air conditioning and lighting control of the guests’ rooms.

Jonathon Lloyd, managing director of Digital Europe, explains, ‘Integration is the key to all of the building-control and energy-management services we offer our customer base.

‘The CentraLine Hawk integration controller, with its flexible capability of interfacing with multiple open protocol,s allows Digital Europe to offer its clients economic and effective integration for new and existing building management systems.’

CentraLine account manager Neil Blakemore, says, ‘One of the main challenges to controls industry is the movement to integration and Internet-based communication, with the advent of tablets and smart phones giving end users and service companies high expectations in availability of remote access.’

‘The Hawk range of integration controllers using the Niagara framework is our primary product for helping customers like Digital Europe continue to offer their clients leading edge technology.

‘This has been enhanced by the release of the Hawk 300e, which is ideally suitable for lower I/O applications where remote communication with smart devices is an essential requirement.’

Sales Manager of CentraLine by Honeywell Jim Sword adds, ‘We are very pleased to have experienced CentraLine Partners like Digital Europe which is fully engaged with the latest developments in integration and control technology. We are looking forward to supporting them in some challenging and rewarding projects.’

To find out more about CentraLine and its Partners please contact CentraLine on 01344 656443

For more information on this story, click here: November 2014, 19
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