By Healthcare Facilities Today

Coopersburg, PA  – Lutron Electronics, the leader in energy-saving, wireless light and shade control, and the Building Technologies Division of Siemens Industry, Inc., the market leader for safe and secure, energy-efficient and environment-friendly buildings and infrastructures, 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. “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.

“We look forward to offering additional solutions for improving a building’s energy consumption and carbon footprint,” said Nancy Stein, Systems and Room Automation Segment Head at Siemens. “Enabling these two systems to share information allows building operators to develop new strategies that help reduce costs as well as meet a company’s business objectives,” said Stein.

About Lutron Electronics (www.lutron.com) Founded in 1961, Lutron Electronics is headquartered in Coopersburg, Pennsylvania, in the heart of the Lehigh Valley. From dimmers for the home, to lighting management systems for entire buildings, the company offers more than 17,000 energy-saving products, sold in more than 100 countries around the world. In the US alone, Lutron products save an estimated 10 billion kWh of electricity, or approximately $1 billion in utility costs per year. The company’s early inventions— including the first solid-state dimmer invented by Lutron’s founder, Joel Spira—are now at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, DC.

About Siemens Building Technologies Division (www.usa.siemens.com/buildingtechnologies)

The Siemens Building Technologies Division (Zug, Switzerland) is the world leader in the market for safe and secure, energy-efficient and environment-friendly buildings and infrastructures. As technology partner, service provider, system integrator and product vendor, Building Technologies has offerings for safety and security as well as building automation, heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) and energy management. With around 29,000 employees worldwide, Building Technologies generated revenue of 5.8 billion Euro.