Skyspark

Skyspark is an Internet of Things (IoT) platform from Skyfoundry that uses heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) and energy data to improve building performance.

In 2017, Energy & Water Services’ Energy Conservation team started tracking energy and water data using Skyspark and now use the platform daily to optimize building control and identify energy and greenhouse gas (GHG) savings opportunities. Skyspark has enabled long-term storage from 68,000 data streams including:

How does it work?

Data Integration: UBC Building’s HVAC systems are controlled using a three vendor Building Management System (BMS) that uses feedback from sensors to maintain thermal comfort and ventilate spaces. All the sensor data is temporarily stored on BMS panels scattered across campus. Skyspark collects data every 15 minutes from the energy metering system (Scheinder) and the three different BMS systems vendors (Johnson, Delta, Siemens) we have on campus.

Figure 1: Skyspark System Integration

 

The Haystack Metadata Standard: In order to makes sense of all of this data, an open-source initiative that defines a comprehensive list of tags called Project Haystack is used to understand HVAC data. By using Project Haystack, we developed our own tagging tools using regular expressions to parse BMS point names. Once the tagging tool is in Skyspark, all data records get automatically tagged following the Project Haystack standard.

 

Learn more

To learn more about the benefits of Skyspark and how our team is using this platform to create new possibilities for energy conservation at UBC, visit Why Skyspark.

All data in Skyspark is accessible online via the Building Energy and Water Data page.