ESSENTIAL HVAC
TIME TO ADD HVAC TO THE MIX
Paul Kinghorn, General Manager at My KNX Store, argues the case for HVAC integration. AV and lighting may be the glamorous ‘front of house’ applications, but every home and commercial building you work in also has heating and ventilation as well. Having some form of heating control is mandatory and integrators will surely have some knowledge of the possibilities for whole-home integration. Operating in a silo limits your business and the project packages you can offer. Your customers expect more and you need to be able to bring HVAC into the mix. That is logically going to mean using an open control platform that enables true integration rather than just running applications in parallel, and that means KNX. Most traditional AV installers have already embraced lighting control as part of their core and may still be exploring the options for broadening their offering. The simple truth is that and once you get beyond the lighting and AV, then an open system based on the KNX protocol is invariably going to be the best answer for you, your customers (assuming you aren’t happy to be held hostage to fortune by a proprietary single-supplier system and the risks that entails). With KNX freedom, you can design integrated, flexible and future-proof solutions. You can even carry over acquired DALI skills
30 JUNE 2022
as there are numerous gateway devices from the 500+ manufacturers of certified KNX compatible devices. Why KNX? There can be little doubt that KNX is the leading global automation platform. A recent survey of over 8000 industry professionals sponsored by the KNX Association, which manages its protocol, its programming software and product certification, proved that KNX is by far the most popular technical standard for home and building automation compared to other communication protocols, and had been used in smart home and building projects by 62% of all industry professionals surveyed. To remind you, KNX is the de facto global open standard, the lingua franca of building control. The thousands of certified KNX devices range from behind the scenes actuators to discrete sensors and fabulously well-designed multi-functional wall panels. The wall panels, switches and touch screens, can be programmed to control the whole system you build in the way you designed it to be used, putting an end to the dreaded ‘wall acne’ of multiple switches and panels which just goes against the grain for good design principles in anyone’s book.
First conceived as a successor to the EIB (European Installation Bus) , KNX is the only global standard for integrated control of all aspects of home and building control, from lighting and AV to HVAC and security. It offers a single, manufacturer-independent design and commissioning tool (ETS), support for all comms media (TP, PL, RF and IP), and a complete set of supported configuration modes (system, easy and automatic mode). Now in its fourth decade, the KNX standard has also introduced secure IoT, more RF functionality and ever-greater system security and BIM compatibility. Physically, it is a bus-based system, with much intelligence distributed to device level which means these no central point of failure and maximum flexibility and scalability – just connect new devices to the nearest node on the bus. As an integrator, you have full scope to create custom systems, choosing and combining the right products from different manufacturers whose KNX-certified products are all guaranteed to work together. There’s scope to use KNX APIs to develop custom software applications.
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