Home Energy Management Amana Brand DigiSmart Wireless Control System Offers Centralized Energy Management Capability

Amana Brand DigiSmart Wireless Control System Offers Centralized Energy Management Capability

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HOUSTON—Goodman Company, L.P., a subsidiary of Goodman Global, Inc. (NYSE: GGL), maker of Amana brand heating and air conditioning products and packaged terminal air conditioners (PTACs), announced the introduction of its new wirelessly networked DigiSmart Control System, an operations management tool designed to be used with the company’s Amana brand PTACs. The company says it is the first wireless PTAC management product of its kind.

“Our new DigiSmart Control System will allow our customers to not only control the environmental conditions in individual rooms—it will also help them to manage their energy costs,” says Dave Craven, Goodman’s director of advanced technologies. “Field studies of full-property installations indicate that a typical location may save up to 35 percent in energy costs. Plus, this can be managed either on-site for a single property, or from one central location for multiple properties.”

The new DigiSmart system represents a significant technological improvement in facilities management. The product, which Goodman developed in collaboration with Tridium, Inc., and Everex Communications, Inc., employs self-configuring, radio frequency (RF)-based wireless mesh technology. To create the wireless mesh, an antenna is simply plugged into the control board of each individual PTAC unit. The wireless mesh offers more stability than older hub-and-spoke networks by providing redundant communication paths.

With the new Amana brand DigiSmart Control System, Goodman and its collaborators have used this wireless technology to create a network of all PTACs installed within a facility, enabling control of unit performance in individual rooms throughout a facility from a single control point.

The DigiSmart system includes in-room wireless thermostats and occupancy sensors, which Goodman developed with Everex, and a Web-based control platform comprised of Tridium’s JACE controller driven by browser-based software built using Tridium’s Niagara platform. The controller and the software work together to enable the DigiSmart Control to automatically discover all installed Amana brand PTAC units and wireless peripherals via the wireless mesh network and to communicate system information via web pages and reports.

“The DigiSmart Control System gives customers complete access to real-time performance information from all connected Amana DigiSmart PTACs, including unit health and maintenance status,” Craven says. “In addition, by building this system with Tridium’s Niagara platform, customers can easily network multiple buildings together via the Internet.”

The company says the DigiSmart Control System is easy to install and can be retrofit on previous Amana PTAC models. For more information, go to Goodman Co.

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