Building automation for a multi-tenant office building

The brief

A landlord was refitting a multi-tenant office building and wanted the control layer to solve a commercial problem as much as a technical one: tenants were billed for energy on floor area, which the larger tenants had started to dispute, and out-of-hours cooling requests were handled by a phone call to the facilities team.

What we did

The metering strategy was designed from the lease plan backwards. Every billable boundary got its own meter — including the odd cases where a tenant occupied part of a floor — so the recharge report could be generated without anyone apportioning a shared meter by hand.

For HVAC, zones were drawn to match the same boundaries, which made out-of-hours operation a per-zone service the tenant can request rather than a floor-wide override the facilities team runs manually.

Delivery notes

Most of the engineering time went into the zoning, not the drawings. Matching control zones to lease boundaries meant reworking the VAV zoning proposed at concept stage, which we raised as a written query with a marked-up alternative in week two rather than drawing what we had been given.

The lighting scope was the straightforward part: occupancy and daylight control on common areas, scheduled by floor, with manual override at the lobby panel.