When I was a student at the Liverpool College of Building about a million years ago – well 1967 actually – one of the lecturers, Dr Ernest Wood, had the foresight to arrange a visit to the nearby College of Technology so that we could use the newly acquired mainframe computer.
Memories of this visit came back recently when I received a press release from Caradon Trend, enclosing a photograph of the very building in which my fellow estate management students and I were introduced to the mysteries of the programming language Algol!
Since that time, of course, a great deal has changed. Computers have become smaller, cheaper and more powerful, and the Liverpool colleges have transmogrified, by stages, into John Moores University (JMU). And now a series of microprocessors supply enough processing power to run JMU’s building management system (BMS).
Supplied and engineered by Impact Control Systems, it incorporates 140 Trend IQ controllers and extends to most of JMU’s sites – of which there are nearly 30 – and all the IQs are linked to a Trend 945 central supervisor.
Since 1989, when the first outstation came on line, the annual energy bill has fallen from £1.1m to £1m. Over the same period its student population has grown from 9,000 to 20,000.
To prevent unnecessary plant operation, the time profiles, to which the individual controllers work, can be set up or extended only via the Trend 945 supervisor, which resides on the desk of JMU’s energy manager.
Given the propensity of students to fall asleep at temperatures fractionally above those of their cold, damp flats, skilled use of the Trend BMS is obviously critical if academic standards are to be maintained!
Details from Caradon Trend Ltd, PO Box 34, Horsham, West Sussex RH12 2YF (01403 211888).
