Lutron Electronics manufacturers of wireless light and shade control, and the Building Technologies Division of Siemens Industry, Inc., developer of energy-efficient and environment-friendly buildings and infrastructures, today announced their collaborative development effort to help make commercial buildings more energy efficient.

The Lutron Quantum Total Light Management System, which controls lights, shades, and small appliances, and the Siemens APOGEE Building Automation System, which allows multiple building systems to work together regardless of their architecture, can be easily integrated together via BACnet. Having these two powerful systems sharing information not only helps make a building more energy efficient, but also can help improve maintenance efficiencies, allowing facility managers and building owners to better evaluate the energy usage within their buildings.

To support these efforts, Lutron and Siemens produced a technical whitepaper offering ‘how to’ instructions for integrating the systems. It is available to all Siemens branch offices and APOGEE dealers, as well as to Lutron sales and field service representatives. The technical paper can guide consulting-specifying engineers in helping to design an efficient system.

“By working closely with Siemens to jointly test the BACnet integration between the Quantum and APOGEE systems, we are able to provide facility managers with a better user experience and ‘single pane of glass’ for managing their different building systems,” said Mark Jenner, New Business Alliances Director at Lutron in a prepared statement. “Instead of disparate pieces of software to manage all of the different building systems – lighting, shading, HVAC, door access, fire/safety, energy metering – BACnet makes it possible to integrate all of the software tools into one, saving valuable time and maximizing efficiencies,” said Jenner.

BACnet was designed to allow communication of building automation and control systems for applications such as heating, ventilating, and air-conditioning control, lighting control, access control, and fire detection systems and their associated equipment. The BACnet protocol allows computerized building automation devices to exchange information, regardless of the particular building service they perform. Proper communication between building automation devices is critical for maximizing building energy efficiency, indoor air quality, and other aspects of “green” buildings.

Curtis Emery is a Content Editor at TechDecisions Media. He is an avid musician and enjoys tracking how technology is changing the way we do things.

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