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Episode 181 is a conversation with James Dice, Rosy Khalife, and Brad Bonavida from Nexus Labs, as well as Nicholas Dumoulin From Dream Real Estate.
Episode 181 features James Dice, Rosy and Brad Bonavida from Nexus Labs, as well as Nicholas Dumoulin from Dream Real Estate. In this episode of the Nexus Podcast, the Nexus Labs team breaks down the top stories relevant to energy managers, facility managers, IT/OT managers, and workplace managers.
Introduction (0:50)
At the Nexus (1:13)
Digitizing Operations & Maintenance (7:21)
Building Performance and Controls (19:39)
Integrating, Connecting, and Securing Devices (27:34)
Rosy’s Rant (31:00)
Sign off (35:14)
Music credits: There Is A Reality by Common Tiger—licensed under an Music Vine Limited Pro Standard License ID: S706971-16073.
Note: transcript was created using an imperfect machine learning tool and lightly edited by a human (so you can get the gist). Please forgive errors!
James Dice: [00:00:00] Hey friends, if you like the Nexus Podcast, the best way to continue the learning is to join our community. There are three ways to do that. First, you can join the Nexus Pro membership. It's our global community of smart billing professionals. We have monthly events, paywall, deep dive content, and a private chat room, and it's just $35 a month.
Second, you can upgrade from the pro membership to our courses offering. It's headlined by our flagship course, the Smart Building Strategist, and we're building a catalog of courses taught by world leading experts on each topic under the smart buildings umbrella. Third, and finally, our marketplace is how we connect leading vendors with buyers looking for their solutions.
The links are below in the show notes. And now let's go onto the podcast.
Welcome back to the Nexus podcast. I'm James, I have some friends with me. Uh, Rosie. Brad, say hi. Hi, howdy. Uh, we're going to talk through what's going on in [00:01:00] the community, uh, over the last couple weeks, and if you wanna get the full experience, definitely check out the Nexus newsletter. That's where we share everything and invite you to everything we're doing.
Um, let's talk about what's going on at the nexus real quick. Um, I will start with our supervisory control board. Um, we talked about this last podcast, but we actually kicked it off, um, in the past week or so. This is our advisory board for Nexus Con and we brought on 14 building owners, um, to. Advise us on the agenda to make it sure, make sure it's basically worth their time.
And, um, really relevant to the day-to-day of the building owner community. Um, and I just love the energy of these kickoff calls that we've had over the past week. Um, building owners really just like setting us straight on what matters for them basically. Uh, any, anything from you guys?
Rosy Khalife: I think for me, what's been interesting, so I've sat in on all of [00:02:00] them and there's been, you know, overlap, like the FMS want to connect with the folks that are part of the energy track and then like ITOT, and so there's been kind like.
Some cross pollination happening. So I do think that's awesome. But it is gonna pose a bit of a challenge for us as we're creating the agenda of how do we make sure that everyone can be part of everything they wanna be part of.
James Dice: Yeah. And that's good. Good to bring up this year, and Brad's working on this, like as we speak.
With his entire day and entire week. But, um, we're splitting the conference out into different tracks this year. Last year the tracks were focused on, um, level of technical detail, but we've shifted that a little bit to have an energy management track at an FM track, uh, IT O2 track and have it be sort of role specific.
And I, I was, I was thinking the same thing, Rosie the FM. The FMS really wanted cybersecurity stuff, but it wasn't at the level of detail that obviously the cybersecurity folks are gonna want it. [00:03:00] So each track will have, um, sort of mixed in with the other tracks a little bit. So. I think Brad's gonna tell us how he's planning on doing that later today, but
Brad Bonavida: I am.
Yeah. And, uh, no, the, the feedback from that group though has been fantastic. Uh, we got some really good ideas from them, but I'll also give us a pat on the back, like we gave all of them kind of a sneak preview to what the agenda looks like thus far, and most of the feedback was like. Yes, I definitely wanna be at this and like this is the right stuff.
Um, so we're gonna incorporate a lot of what they put in, but we also just got a good, like, reality check that we're, we're on the right track. So it's gonna be, and that's
James Dice: us being on the right track, but it's also just the, we're curating 140 plus abstracts that we received. Fair point. We didn't write. So the community is on the right track.
Yeah,
Brad Bonavida: yeah, exactly.
James Dice: Yeah. Uh, okay. Rezi, what's your, what's your update?
Rosy Khalife: So we have a webinar happening next week. It's on June 11th, and we will have the link in the show notes. You can also sign up. It's the links on our [00:04:00] LinkedIn, it's in our newsletters everywhere right now. The webinar is really meant to be a time for us to get together, give you a sneak peek of, of what to expect at the conference.
This is great if you are already planning on joining or you haven't bought your ticket yet, or you're on the fence. So no matter what stage you're at, just come. It'll be fun. We'll all get together and kind of connect about it.
James Dice: Great, Brad, what's yours?
Brad Bonavida: The next, the next week, June 18th, we're having our third building owner meetup.
Uh, yeah, so this is the third time we've done this. This one's gonna be focused on space utilization. Basically the concept is we get any sort of, uh, landlords, tenants, people who are interested in that to come talk about what they're trying to do with space utilization, how they're using it effectively, how they wanna use it effectively.
And the feedback that we've gotten is that we do like virtual breakout rooms during those people love them. We're even gonna make 'em smaller this time. So you're gonna be in a room with like. Four or five other, um, building owners who are interested in kind of the same technology for the same reasons as you and get [00:05:00] to talk through some of this stuff.
Um, so yeah, we're excited for that. Uh, it's free for any building owner to come join, uh, open Invite.
James Dice: Great. Yeah, and this is our third one. We started doing these. They're, they're building owners only a couple of demo, like quick demos from vendors where it's relevant, but building owners only. And it's, um, yeah, just a vulnerable place to share what, what you're working on.
Um. Nick, our special guest for today is Nick. Uh, go ahead and introduce yourself, Nick, and tell us what's going on, uh, in your world. Hey
Nicholas Dumoulin: everyone. Yeah. Name's, uh, Nick Ley. I am, uh, the senior manager for Smart Billing Technology with Dream Office. Uh, although I do work with our industrial and our multi-res reach as well.
Um, and yeah, I, uh, manage our smart building program at Dream and. Um, deal with all the day-to-day of our, uh, operational technology and building out standards and our capital deployments. So really the full cycle of all [00:06:00]these systems. So, um, what I've been working on lately is it's capital planning season, so not exciting, but this is when we start making all our pitches to get, uh, the funding and try to make the, the good arguments of, uh, why we should be investing in, in all this, uh, technology.
Um, so we're really identifying. Uh, which assets have the, the most critical issues, the ones that are affecting tenants the most, our operations teams, the most, our energy impact and kind of trying to summarize all those, um, different areas of impact and why we should be, uh, investing in some systems, uh, versus other.
And I. And all that kind of stuff. So that's taken a lot of time lately. Um, on the more nerdy side, um, we're getting pretty close to finishing up a pilot project, um, using lower wan wireless technology for, um, a bunch of use cases. But the primary one we're looking at right now is, is, uh, leak detection. So, um, but the idea is to, to do leak detection and then also just [00:07:00] validate the, the technology and the product, um, in particular.
Cool. So
James Dice: that's great. There's a bunch of vendors out there right now hoping that they were gonna be in Dreams Budget, and they're like scrambling now that you said that. Yep. You guys have two weeks. Thank you. All right, let's jump in to our first category, uh, here. Digitizing operations and maintenance. We had an article that I published a couple weeks back called, um, we Know Where the People Are.
Why doesn't the HVAC system, and this is why we wanted to bring you in, Nick. Um, basically you and you and I, and you and us, you and Nexus have been talking about this for damn near 18 months now. Um, you aren't the only one we've talked to about this, right? Um, we've heard from a lot of building owners that have looked at space utilization to tie in the event that's coming up in a couple weeks.
They've then wondered if I install these sensors to count people. Or I centralize my data [00:08:00] to understand where people are at. Why can't I then just take that, map that to my HVAC zones and reduce my conditioning of those spaces when there's reduced people or zero people in those spaces? And. I wrote an article about why that's too fucking hard to do and no one's doing it because it's just too complicated in three ways.
One is the business case is murky. Um, first cost is too high and ongoing cost is too high, sorry, vendors. Um, the second one is operational silos. So you often have, um. Workplace. People installing, people counting or the tenant in dreams case. Right. And then you have the landlord controlling the hvac. If you also have a property manager that's in there too, that's responsible for the control system.
Like now we have three different, sometimes parties, uh, that are. That, those are just some of them, right? Then you add in sustainability and you add in blah, blah. You [00:09:00] know, it, it gets pretty murky from there. So I interviewed Matt Sexton from VXP. I interviewed Butler R zero and OTI on the vendor side, and, uh, people should check out this article.
Um. Nick, tell us where you're at with this. Uh, you mentioned the lower WAN project, but I know you have had other, other, at least budgeting and piloting exercises around trying to figure out how to get your energy consumption down using people counting and mapping that to your HVAC zones.
Nicholas Dumoulin: So we pretty much started the process of just kind of seeing what technology is out there and, and working with Nexus Lab to see, um, both technology and vendors.
Because when it comes to people counting, there's a lot of different, like at the sensor level, there's a lot of different approaches you can take to people counting, um, everything from, you know, computer vision overlay on CCTB cameras to thermal, to motion to like time of flight. Like there's just a lot of.
[00:10:00] Fundamental hardware differences and then trying to understand what areas or applications each are stronger and more accurate in. It's really a lot to kind of sift through and try to understand at that core level. Um, and so we kind of want to understand and just how the business model is, like, how do these different vendors charge for this, uh, for.
Installing these, the, these, these sensors, um, was really core to understanding how do we. Build out a program around this and, and deploy at scale. Um, so we started there, we got the results back. Um, unfortunately, you know, a lot of vendors are really based on, um, SaaS fees, those annual fees, and as a landlord those are really hard to swallow.
Um. And kind of scale, especially when you're like comparing to a traditional building automation system where we spend the capital we put in the [00:11:00]system, and sure there's some ongoing maintenance costs, um, but for the most part, you're not paying like a subscription fee for the data you're collecting indefinitely, right?
Those sensors are installed. We own that data internal to our buildings, and we can do with. What we want, um, with it. So that was one of the big challenges. Um, from there, we identified an opportunity, uh, in one of our properties where we had recently upgraded, um, the lighting control system to be a fully, um, modern, um, lighting control system with occupancy sensors and day lighting.
Um, and it had a backnet, uh, option. To export the data out of that system. So we worked with our, uh, building automation vendor for HVAC controls and got them to, um, basically import the occupancy sensor data from the lighting control system, um, into the HVAC and set up our [00:12:00] occupancy based control. So, you know, just to be clear, this isn't people counting, it's just on off occupancy.
Um, but even with just with that, we are able to see really good results on. Um, this pilot. So, um, and, and there's a couple different reasons why I went through that strategy that we can get into as well later, so,
James Dice: yeah. Yeah. Well, one of the things that we helped you with is just engaging the vendor marketplace.
Right. And it stuck out to me, like thinking back on that process over a year ago. You were pretty strong in basically saying like, we can't, we have to minimize the ongoing costs or else this doesn't pencil. Right. For sure. And when we, when we engaged the marketplace, I think we only found, was it Brad? Was it one or two?
Maybe Just one. So
Brad Bonavida: one
James Dice: plus one with an
Brad Bonavida: asterisk maybe.
James Dice: Yeah. Yeah. One people accounting vendor basically, that didn't have an ongoing cost and it was an optional thing if you wanted to like add their [00:13:00] software onto it. Right. Um, and we have just been challenging the marketplace ever since that because it feels like, you know, that's a big part of the market that just doesn't wanna pay a SaaS fee.
They just want to use the data and especially for this use case, right? Um, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to. It's not really like in the history of controls, you've never had to pay a SaaS fee for a sensor that's in your control system. It's just a hardware device that plugs into your control system.
There's not really a SaaS component to it. Exactly. I think the marketplace is murky in that a lot of these startups are, um. Trying to provide space utilization as well. And so just, you know, chopping off that stack, device layer, application layer, there aren't a lot that are just trying to stay at the device layer, which is interesting.
Nicholas Dumoulin: Yeah, the feeling I get from it as well is like, these vendors are really geared towards tenants, like corporate and commercial tenants that are trying to [00:14:00] understand how to use their space, um, as a landlord. I don't really like, I mean this is gonna sound bad, but I don't really wanna give that information to my tenants so that they can decide, hey, downsize and rent less space from us.
Right? So our incentives aren't really aligned. Um, and I don't think a lot of people talk about that, but, um, you know, in that case, like, I think that's where really where those vendors are marketing to, I think they're not really geared towards landlords. Um, and the other thing they have to be very careful of is like a lot of the building automation manufacturers are now starting to release.
They're, they've been playing catch up, but they're starting to release their own people counting sensors or multi-sensor hubs and stuff like that to compete. And these will be, they don't have SaaS fees, they'll just integrate into your BS system. Um, so you know, that time period where they were kind of the leaders on the hardware side might.
[00:15:00] Uh, it might be coming to an end. So,
James Dice: yeah. And, and that happened in my interviews for this piece. So Brian Turner at OTI told me about a sensor that doesn't have SaaS fees, that's $400 a retail price. And he said this, and it's got IQ and people counting. And he was just basically like, this is, this is the standard.
It like a sensor needs to get down to that price. It needs to have optional SaaS or none. And that, that was his opinion. Right. Um, obviously there's still room for all of the providers that have. Software. If your software provides value, you should charge sasb.
Brad Bonavida: Yeah. Yeah. I was going to just say you're spot on with like the difference with the outcomes.
Because if you're going for space utilization and really knowing like your workplace and where people are at, those platforms that they're providing, add a ton of value because like, oh yeah, BAS can't provide those analytics. But when we're talking about this use case of like, you know, saving energy.
Maybe you can do it from your BAS and [00:16:00] I just, I have to, you have to give me an a second to engineering nerd out on this topic because I've gone really deep into it in past lives and it is just fascinating. I think a lot of people have seen the challenges in this, but I. Um, just quickly, the way that you know, you save the concept here is that people need outdoor air.
So you have more people, you need more outdoor air. You have to run your fan faster. Less people, you need less outdoor air. You run your fan less fast. And fans operate on the fan affinity law, which means that you're exponentially saving energy when you slow your fan down. It's not linear, it's exponential.
I think it's actually cubic, um. So the first problem is like you have to be able to change the speed of your fan to get that energy savings. And a lot of people don't realize that they have a single speed fan that can't even change, uh, speed, you know? So you gotta be able to modulate the speed, and then on top of that, quickly it gets really nasty when you get into heating and cooling mode.
Because if you're cooling a space, you're dehumidifying it and you're cooling the air, it's sensible cooling and [00:17:00] latent cooling. So if you slow the fan down too much because you're like, this is a big room, there's only one person in it, but it needs to be cooled, um, all of a sudden all you're doing is taking all the humidity outta the air and you're not actually lowering the temperature of the air.
Uh, so that gets super messy. And then heating as well. Let's say you have one person in the room and you don't need that much airflow. Well, hot air rises and if it's a big room and you're just barely pushing air into there, it's not actually getting to the bottom of the space and doing anything. So, uh, that, you know, we could go for an hour down that path, but it's just can get so complicated on the technical side.
And I know a lot of people were commenting on the article with how difficult it can be to figure that all out.
James Dice: Yeah. And there's the, also the zoning of the system. Like if you, if you can't turn down the system, it's the, um. Se like the schedules and sequences on the VAV box or whatever actually serves that zone.
It's, yeah, it's, there's, there's a lot of complexity around, and, and in the article, I challenged the design community, right? Because the design [00:18:00]community needs to be designing HVAC systems for this technology to be prevalent when it, when it becomes prevalent. Yeah. All right. Let's move on. Nick, do you have anything else to add on your project?
You wanna give us like a, where's the headed next?
Nicholas Dumoulin: Um, where's it heading next? Uh, not sure really. Uh, we're trying to find other assets where this would be applicable, where we have a, like ideally we leverage what's in place for the lighting controls and in the building automation. Like my strategy around this is, is actually twofold.
It, I'm trying to get investment both to upgrade our lighting control systems, to incorporate occupancy design or occupancy sensors. Um. Because a lot of them don't. Um, so that we get the savings on the lighting control. But since we. By and large move to LED lighting. The savings you get from just lighting alone is not as much as it used to.
So the value of those occupancy sensors for lighting controls is not as high as we would've used to see. [00:19:00] So by being able to say, Hey, we can attach this to our HVAC and actually get HVAC savings, which turns out to be more significant than the lighting savings nowadays. Um, that ROI piece. Makes that business case stronger.
Um, so that's one strategy I'm trying to, to employ internally to get that investment to, to do that. So, um, that's one approach we're looking at. Obviously we can just look at adding sensors directly to the, uh, HVAC controls, um, as, as another, uh, way that we can achieve this. So
James Dice: fascinating.
Let's go to energy Management performance controls. We had another article come out around what's still in the US at least. So, so Dream is in Canada. I don't know if we mentioned that. So next, next on in Toronto. Um, but we wrote an article about what's still driving decarbonization projects, um, in the US and um.
Just given everything [00:20:00] politically, it just basically decarb has turned into a bad word. We're, we're still gonna use that term at Nexus Labs, but it's definitely turned into a politicized word these days. Um, and I talked with, um, energy management vendors at Insight Grid and Mantis Innovations. And I was honestly inspired by what they told me, like it gave me more hope than I had before talking to them.
Um, if I can quickly summarize real quick, basically they said that it's just basically business as usual. Um, if you think about the tailwinds behind decarbonization that have happened, I. Over the last five years or so, all three of these companies had been doing it before those tailwinds. And so they, they basically were like, yeah, it's been nice having those tailwinds federally and politically over the last four years, five years, but we didn't need those before and we definitely don't need them still because these projects, like the fundamental drivers behind these projects.
Haven't really changed. And [00:21:00] so insight talked about how the healthcare sector and hospitality sectors are really taking off. Um, government still, they do a lot of government work, federal government work, and they're still getting a lot of that work because it's about cost savings. Thought that was interesting.
Um, grid Am primarily serves commercial real estate. So like the dreams of the world and. Um, they basically said that their software drives low and no cost, energy savings, improvements, and so their software is more popular than it ever was. It's growing faster than it ever was. They're seeing less retrofit projects than they they had before.
But what I thought was interesting is that all of the CRE landlords out there aren't necessarily, they're still developing like their roadmap. They might not implement it because they know where things are going. Long term is to decarbonize. They might not be as motivated near [00:22:00] term to actually do those projects, but they wanna understand their exposure, which I thought was interesting.
Um, mantis serves a lot of, um. Retail and corporate customers. So like they spoke with Dollar Tree at, at Nexus Con last year, and they, they had told some interesting stories around how maybe those tailwinds from the past few years, like, got some of these programs kickstarted. But now those programs have such critical mass and momentum that they're not going anywhere.
Um, and so they were basically like, we're, you know, we're, we're moving, we're moving along. So. I was, I was energized by that being someone that cares deeply about climate change and also cares deeply about, you know, getting this technology in installed, in, in buildings. Um, what did you guys think?
Nicholas Dumoulin: I think you're spot on, James.
Like, obviously I'm coming from a Canadian perspective, but that's exactly what I'm seeing from my, my side of the fence as well. Um, our sustainability teams and like internally, were really, and. My team is, is responsible [00:23:00] for really deploying those capital for our decarbonization plan. So very integrated into that.
And yeah, it, there's a slowdown, but we're not, we're still doing a lot of the work that we were doing a couple years later and we're still in the, like still planning, strategizing and making sure we're as prepared as we can be when the capital is there. Um, and once the will is there to go. Right. And, um, yeah, I mean we, April 1st.
Our carbon, uh, tax also got canceled by the federal government. So the cost for like carbon emissions is, uh, not being priced in, um, in the Canadian market right now. Um, so that's just similar to you guys. We have like headwinds that's affecting, um, how we go about this. So,
Brad Bonavida: Nick, is there like a particular.
Building performance energy standard that you guys care about the most? Like was it that carbon tax that you just said got lifted or what are you guys looking at? I. Mainly when you're trying to meet [00:24:00] a certain level of efficiency.
Nicholas Dumoulin: That is more of a question for my sustainability team, but we do like extensive reporting.
That's pretty much in line with what you would probably see in the us. So I think gresb Energy star, like they're, they're going after all the same kind of lead, like all these different programs. Which one's the most important to us? Uh, I'm not entirely sure. Yeah. But, um, it's generally what the market's looking for, what tenants are, are looking for.
Investors are looking for. Right to make decisions. They don't, I would say care less about whether it's in Canada or US, or those are separate kind of decisions. But in terms of the performance of the building, we rate it the same way. We're pretty similar here to, you know, the US market in that regard.
James Dice: Yeah. Yeah. Tenants want low carbon space. Investors want lower carbon investments. Yep. Um, cool. I
Brad Bonavida: think that the, the silver lining is like, I love. The, the take that you kind of, uh, the, what I took outta the article, James, is like this alignment of. If it's not decarb standards that are [00:25:00] being, or regulations that are being pushed, it's aligning, saving money on your utility bill and having a more reliable energy source with also decarbonizing.
And like when you can get sustainability aligned with also like the bottom dollar of your utility savings, then everybody is on the same team without a doubt. Um, so That's great. Oh, and I also wanted to point out, um. Um, we, we have a comment section now in, uh, the Nexus Lab's website. So James, I know you and I were kind talking, Maggie, read my
Rosy Khalife: mind.
Good job. Thank you for bringing that up.
Brad Bonavida: Thanks. Thanks to you, Rosie, for getting that in there.
Rosy Khalife: Yeah.
Brad Bonavida: Um, but James, you had this, I think it's a, it's
James Dice: a little bit of a, like a peak under the hood of like how many things the three of us are actually doing on a day-to-day basis. Like we changed websites like two years ago.
And for some reason the new website didn't have comments, the old did, and we just have too much going on to where like, we just never solved that problem. And like, if you like commenting on our stuff, we're sorry about that. But like, it just shows how [00:26:00] smaller things like that don't necessarily make it to the top of our to-do list.
So, sorry, but Rosie, Rosie made it happen on a, on a whim a couple weeks ago. Well done.
Brad Bonavida: Thank you. It's, it's great 'cause you can go in and like this one, I live in Colorado, obviously, James, you and I both. So I was very interested when he talked about the lawsuit against the, um, standards in Colorado. And just, I, you know, we're talking in the comments that the latest on that is that, uh, I guess they didn't prove that you actually had to replace equipment in order to meet the new standards.
So the lawsuit got thrown out temporarily. Like you can meet the standards in Colorado without having to replace equipment. So they were like, okay, this, you can do this. You don't, this is no good case to not have these standards.
James Dice: Well, what's hilarious is I just saw that with Brad and I didn't immediately make the connection that that was you.
Um, comment. Now I know that was you.
Rosy Khalife: Yeah. I read James' reply to you and it was like, thanks Brad and I, and I knew it was you that had commented that.
Brad Bonavida: [00:27:00] Oh. 'cause it doesn't say my name, my full name.
Rosy Khalife: No, I mean it should say your name. It should say your name, but I dunno if it says your last name.
James Dice: I was like, oh, we have some other Brad in Colorado.
Well, there's a bunch of other comments on the other
Brad Bonavida: articles too, so people have to check it out, get involved
James Dice: so people feel free to comment on the articles. I loved, um, last podcast we had Chris from Walmart and he like disagreed with something I wrote, which is great. And I'd, I'd love to see more disagreement in the, in the, in the bring
Rosy Khalife: the spice, people
James Dice: bring the spice.
Let's go to ot. So integrating, connecting and securing devices. Brad, you're gonna, uh, tee something up for us here?
Brad Bonavida: Yeah, we got a clip from last year's Nexus Con. Uh, this is, uh, from two 70 Park Avenue. So JP Morgan Chase's building in New York City. Uh, Mike Crawl is talking about it. This building is 2.5 million square feet.
It's the highest occupied floor in New York City. It's a hundred percent electric. [00:28:00] It's, uh, sourced from renewable power. It's really cool. But he's talking about, you know, a big part about doing that is getting smarts into the building. And that's hard because you don't know if you're gonna break a building when you put new smart things into it.
So he's gonna explain the boat.
James Dice: By the way, real quick, before you press play, I was with. Michael in January and he gave me a tour of this lab that they have that he's gonna talk about. Uh, and let me
say it is, it is awesome. So what we've done in part because we were able to do, uh, a lot of this initial testing and, and create a lab for ourselves is we are creating what, what we've termed, I'm very proud of this one, the boat, it's the building operations acceptance testing environment.
Right? Like in software development, you'd have a UAT, we have a, a boat. My plan as we move in is no version of a device or software will be tested, will be pushed to the building until it is pushed into the boat and we rock the boat that we smoke test or [00:29:00] 'cause. Not only do we need to depend on the fact that it's not gonna brick the controller that's out in the field and have to have us go out and somebody press that hard reset button on it, but we're building integrations to all these things and we're building downstream and upstream dependencies on all these things.
I need to make sure that those don't check change either. I can't have an integration break because some, some vet pushed a new firmware version to their device and it somehow changed that their API or their backnet was, was configured. So we are actually scheduling our, our testing in the boat before we do anything to the building.
James Dice: I love seeing the look on Andy Schoenberg's face when he set the boat. It was like such a nerdy reaction that was like, I love this acronym so much from Andy. It was funny. So thank you Michael, for presenting that at the conference. I think
Brad Bonavida: it's, it's so applicable to Nick and James, what you guys were just talking about with the occupancy based ventilation control.
Like that's an example of integrating. Multiple systems together. And [00:30:00]imagine you have that turned all the way up on like one of the smartest buildings in New York City and you've got space booking, talking to occupancy, talking to hvac, talking to lighting, and all of a sudden you're like, space booking company changes firmwares.
And now none of it works. Like that's what he's talking about is when you build more integrations, it matters a heck of a lot more when someone tweaks a little thing. 'cause it has so much downstream effect. I just really appreciate the way you explained to the boat and how they're testing things out like that.
James Dice: I wish I could talk about all the things that he told me on that tour that I can't talk about. I wish we could publish all, everything going on behind the scenes in that project because it, it, they open in August or September or something like that. So that project is still ongoing. And so all of the smart building vendor selections and competitions and all the stuff that's happening behind the scenes that we can't publish, uh, is really, really fascinating because of how big, just how.
That project is. Thank you Michael. Um, alright, let's, next section. Rosie's ran adding [00:31:00] this in this time. Go ahead.
Brad Bonavida: I'll, I'll tee this up. I'll tee this up. So Rosie has done, maybe some of you have seen it, she's posted some of these on LinkedIn, but basically. James and I get this behind the scenes look, I feel like of Rosie, of she's got startup experience, she's got marketing experience in like IOT and in smart buildings and she'll see something that doesn't make sense or isn't quite right and she'll get really passionate about it.
So we call it Rosie's Rants. So we're introducing it here to the podcast of Rosie's rants. Uh, what do you think, James? You wanna add anything before she go? She goes off on, on it.
James Dice: I sometimes call them bursts. She, she like, right. Too much energy to hold and it just bursts out. Bursts out. So go ahead Rosie.
Thank you guys. We really, really set you up here.
Rosy Khalife: Really did. Um, thank you for the support and for seeing me for who I am. So lately, I mean, there's so much to talk about, but we'll jump into Juan. We'll hopefully do one of these on each episode. But Brad [00:32:00] and I and James get to see so many demos as you know.
From, from vendors, and we get to talk to building owners on the flip side. And so we're constantly hearing like, it's almost like we have two different sides in our ears, one in the side, one on the other side, you know, sharing their reactions to what they're seeing and their day-to-day jobs. And so one that's come up a few times is the disconnect that is often happening between product teams on the vendor side, product teams, the marketers that are trying to sell or market the solutions.
And then how building owners are then being sold to. And so there's these three kind of sides. So we have the building owners, we have the salespeople at the, on the vendor side, we have the marketers on the vendor side, and then we have the actual product people that are creating these solutions. And so if you think of those four types of stakeholders, they are often saying.
All different things, all four of them. Right. And so I think there's a, there's a somewhat of a problem. I've been in a few calls lately [00:33:00] where it, on the call there was a product person, there was a sales team, and then there was the marketing people. And on that same call. There was disconnects of what they were each saying on that, on just the one call that we're part of.
And so imagine if you are a building owner and you're hearing this, it's, it's very confusing. So I think it results in confused buyers. It results in stalled implementations. It results in creating more of a trust problem from the building owner side. You know, when they do actually do go to implement a solution.
So I was trying to figure out like, you know, how do we fix this? What, what do we do? And I think at, at the very least, we need to bring all of those stakeholders together in the same room. Like marketers should be hearing what building owners are saying, not just hearing that from the sales team. And same goes for product and so on.
And so how do we do that? We need to bring them all together, you know, on one table. And so luckily we get to do that at Nexus Con. That's just a snippet, a moment in [00:34:00] time, but we need to keep doing that, you know? Throughout the year. So James, uh, Nick, Brad, anyone have anything to share about this?
James Dice: Well, we have a, we have a very specific partner I'm thinking of right now, who, um, their marketing people are completely frozen because those other groups you mentioned haven't like, decided what their strategy is for like, who they're targeting, what message, like what their product is doing this year that they wanna highlight.
And so. It's just like the marketing people are a little bit handcuffed sometimes.
Brad Bonavida: But then James, we have another partner who is in the exact opposite situation, I think, where, uh, talking to their marketing group, they're like, oh, should we just pivot and say it like this or say it like that? And they're talking about these like.
Existent existential changes that like if the product person were here and they heard you saying that you're gonna just turn around and describe it the other way, like it doesn't do that right now. So like that would take a year of engineering to make it do that. So it goes [00:35:00] both ways for sure.
James Dice: Yeah. It is, it's fascinating.
Cool. Good
Brad Bonavida: stuff. Preach, Rosie.
James Dice: Alright, let's, let's wrap this up. Thank you Rosie, for your rant. Let's go to carve outs. Um, so something fun, more personal about you, um, what you read, listened to what you did last weekend, et cetera. Brad, you go first.
Brad Bonavida: Okay. Quickly. I, I already shared this with you guys, but I'm really proud.
Uh, I, I live really close to the headwaters of the Arkansas River. It's like peak rafting season right now. It's a really big part of the community. I am not a rafter. I have like very, I've gone like twice in my life, but this last weekend I had a friend who let me, uh, like. Quote unquote guide for the first time.
So I sat in the back of a raft with five other people in it and was in charge of steering and telling everyone else when to row and I didn't flip us. Um, so it was awesome. It was a really fun experience.
Rosy Khalife: Nice job's. Brad.
James Dice: I have a story that that ties onto that. Last summer I went to [00:36:00] Durango to visit Dennis Krieger, who works for Clockworks Analytics, and him and I rafted down.
What's the, the animus. Is that what it's called? Yeah, the animus. And, um, we ran into the bridge and I got thrown out of our raft, like airborne sort of thing. And Dennis is like a hero. He like, mid-air, grabs me and pulls me back into the boat. So, so wait, did
Rosy Khalife: Dennis save your life?
James Dice: No, I would've just like swam, but I, I wouldn't have been in the RAF with him anymore.
Didn't, I would've had to like swim to the side of the river.
Rosy Khalife: Oh, okay. Okay.
James Dice: Yeah.
Rosy Khalife: Wow. What'd you say, Nick?
James Dice: Did you touch water at any point? Oh, I was like half, I was my waist. I was waist deep in water. Wow. And he, he grabbed me and like, I don't know.
Brad Bonavida: It's pro. That's awesome. And
James Dice: what I found out afterwards, I'm just giving Dennis so much shit right now.
Hopefully he listens to this. What I found out afterwards is he had just got this raft and he was too scared to take his, [00:37:00] his wife and son on this. So I was the Guinea pig. Nice. And so I was, I did my job actually. I think I did my job. Definitely. Um, okay. My carve out is, um, Bon of Air's new album. Um, it's called Sable Fable.
And if you think of anybody who's listened to Bon Air in the past, it's like sad wintery songs and like lots of emotion to them. And this is him like. A little bit happier and like, kind of like Springtime Bone Bear. And I just wanna say, I've listened to this album, I think at Spotify at the year end, it's gonna be like, are you okay?
Like, are, is it, is everything okay with you? Like, I've listened to this album so many times, it's crazy.
Rosy Khalife: That's awesome. Cool. So check it
James Dice: out.
Rosy Khalife: Cool.
James Dice: Nick, what's yours?
Nicholas Dumoulin: Uh, mine is, uh, I bought a house, uh, in September, my first home and just started our. First, like big renovation project to decarbonize the house.
Cool. Um, so sustainability, carbon, cl, uh, you know, climate change. Very, uh, also [00:38:00] very passionate about that for myself. So I'm excited to kind of go through that journey. And the work has officially begun. We've, we've started demo this, uh, this past week. So, um, away we go. What's the project? Sorry.
James Dice: What's the project?
What's the, is it water heater or furnace or,
Nicholas Dumoulin: uh, furnace? Hot water heater. We replaced the oven when we moved in 'cause the oven was natural gas, but the, the oven did not work. Um, so had to put in the two 20 plug to get an induction stove in. So that's already been done, but we're getting rid of the last couple.
Of natural gas appliances and then we're like re insulating the whole basement. 'cause there's no insulation in the basement. It's a hundred year old house. Um, so we're open up walls and finding lots of, uh, fun surprises, um, along with that. But yeah, we're trying to improve the building envelope, all that fun stuff.
So Love it.
James Dice: Love that. Been down that road before as well. Rosie, what's yours? All
Rosy Khalife: right. My [00:39:00] carve out is a company called Swim Zip. So when I was on Shark Tank at the time of filming, there was a woman there, her name's Betsy Johnson. She started a, a swim line that had SPF in it. And at the time I didn't have any kids and so it wasn't, you know, I didn't, I didn't need the product, but I just bought it recently from my little guy.
And it is amazing. Highly recommend. And guess what? I'm actually gonna buy it for myself. 'cause it's that good. You don't need to put a sunscreen on. It's called swim zip
James Dice: because this thing covers your whole body.
Rosy Khalife: No, Y yeah. I mean, yeah, kind of.
James Dice: So it's
Brad Bonavida: like a wet,
Rosy Khalife: it doesn't have to. It doesn't have to, but that's the one I got.
The long sleeve, like as long. It's great though, and it's such great prints. So check it out. And they have, for adults and kids, does
James Dice: hold on every piece of clothes. You just wanna block all the sun. Is that
Rosy Khalife: just like some of the sun so you don't get burned? It's awesome. Check out out.
Brad Bonavida: Doesn't all don't, don't all clothes block from getting sunburned [00:40:00] though.
Rosy Khalife: No, they don't. Actually, Brad. They don't. Okay. Yeah.
Brad Bonavida: Why would sunscreen, sunscreen on below my clothes?
Rosy Khalife: You're supposed to. Yeah. I swear to God. No. I What A summer
Nicholas Dumoulin: is to not have as much clothes on.
Rosy Khalife: Guys, we're, we're making jokes of a reals topic. That's actually important. It's a legit thing. It's real. I'm
Nicholas Dumoulin: a ginger.
James Dice: I understand.
Rosy Khalife: Okay, thank you. I
James Dice: think
Rosy Khalife: I
James Dice: just would like if, if I have to never see the sun again on my skin, I would just, I just give me skin cancer. It's fine.
Rosy Khalife: No,
James Dice: sorry. Alright, that's a great place to end. Thank you Nick, for joining us. Thank you Nick. You all in two weeks. Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for.
Rosy Khalife: Okay, friends, thank you for listening to this episode. As we continue to grow our global community of change makers, we need your help. For the next couple of months, we're challenging our listeners to share a link to their favorite Nexus episode on LinkedIn with a short post about why you listen. It would really, really help us out.
Make sure to tag us in the [00:41:00] post so we can see it. Have a good one.
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Episode 181 is a conversation with James Dice, Rosy Khalife, and Brad Bonavida from Nexus Labs, as well as Nicholas Dumoulin From Dream Real Estate.
Episode 181 features James Dice, Rosy and Brad Bonavida from Nexus Labs, as well as Nicholas Dumoulin from Dream Real Estate. In this episode of the Nexus Podcast, the Nexus Labs team breaks down the top stories relevant to energy managers, facility managers, IT/OT managers, and workplace managers.
Introduction (0:50)
At the Nexus (1:13)
Digitizing Operations & Maintenance (7:21)
Building Performance and Controls (19:39)
Integrating, Connecting, and Securing Devices (27:34)
Rosy’s Rant (31:00)
Sign off (35:14)
Music credits: There Is A Reality by Common Tiger—licensed under an Music Vine Limited Pro Standard License ID: S706971-16073.
Note: transcript was created using an imperfect machine learning tool and lightly edited by a human (so you can get the gist). Please forgive errors!
James Dice: [00:00:00] Hey friends, if you like the Nexus Podcast, the best way to continue the learning is to join our community. There are three ways to do that. First, you can join the Nexus Pro membership. It's our global community of smart billing professionals. We have monthly events, paywall, deep dive content, and a private chat room, and it's just $35 a month.
Second, you can upgrade from the pro membership to our courses offering. It's headlined by our flagship course, the Smart Building Strategist, and we're building a catalog of courses taught by world leading experts on each topic under the smart buildings umbrella. Third, and finally, our marketplace is how we connect leading vendors with buyers looking for their solutions.
The links are below in the show notes. And now let's go onto the podcast.
Welcome back to the Nexus podcast. I'm James, I have some friends with me. Uh, Rosie. Brad, say hi. Hi, howdy. Uh, we're going to talk through what's going on in [00:01:00] the community, uh, over the last couple weeks, and if you wanna get the full experience, definitely check out the Nexus newsletter. That's where we share everything and invite you to everything we're doing.
Um, let's talk about what's going on at the nexus real quick. Um, I will start with our supervisory control board. Um, we talked about this last podcast, but we actually kicked it off, um, in the past week or so. This is our advisory board for Nexus Con and we brought on 14 building owners, um, to. Advise us on the agenda to make it sure, make sure it's basically worth their time.
And, um, really relevant to the day-to-day of the building owner community. Um, and I just love the energy of these kickoff calls that we've had over the past week. Um, building owners really just like setting us straight on what matters for them basically. Uh, any, anything from you guys?
Rosy Khalife: I think for me, what's been interesting, so I've sat in on all of [00:02:00] them and there's been, you know, overlap, like the FMS want to connect with the folks that are part of the energy track and then like ITOT, and so there's been kind like.
Some cross pollination happening. So I do think that's awesome. But it is gonna pose a bit of a challenge for us as we're creating the agenda of how do we make sure that everyone can be part of everything they wanna be part of.
James Dice: Yeah. And that's good. Good to bring up this year, and Brad's working on this, like as we speak.
With his entire day and entire week. But, um, we're splitting the conference out into different tracks this year. Last year the tracks were focused on, um, level of technical detail, but we've shifted that a little bit to have an energy management track at an FM track, uh, IT O2 track and have it be sort of role specific.
And I, I was, I was thinking the same thing, Rosie the FM. The FMS really wanted cybersecurity stuff, but it wasn't at the level of detail that obviously the cybersecurity folks are gonna want it. [00:03:00] So each track will have, um, sort of mixed in with the other tracks a little bit. So. I think Brad's gonna tell us how he's planning on doing that later today, but
Brad Bonavida: I am.
Yeah. And, uh, no, the, the feedback from that group though has been fantastic. Uh, we got some really good ideas from them, but I'll also give us a pat on the back, like we gave all of them kind of a sneak preview to what the agenda looks like thus far, and most of the feedback was like. Yes, I definitely wanna be at this and like this is the right stuff.
Um, so we're gonna incorporate a lot of what they put in, but we also just got a good, like, reality check that we're, we're on the right track. So it's gonna be, and that's
James Dice: us being on the right track, but it's also just the, we're curating 140 plus abstracts that we received. Fair point. We didn't write. So the community is on the right track.
Yeah,
Brad Bonavida: yeah, exactly.
James Dice: Yeah. Uh, okay. Rezi, what's your, what's your update?
Rosy Khalife: So we have a webinar happening next week. It's on June 11th, and we will have the link in the show notes. You can also sign up. It's the links on our [00:04:00] LinkedIn, it's in our newsletters everywhere right now. The webinar is really meant to be a time for us to get together, give you a sneak peek of, of what to expect at the conference.
This is great if you are already planning on joining or you haven't bought your ticket yet, or you're on the fence. So no matter what stage you're at, just come. It'll be fun. We'll all get together and kind of connect about it.
James Dice: Great, Brad, what's yours?
Brad Bonavida: The next, the next week, June 18th, we're having our third building owner meetup.
Uh, yeah, so this is the third time we've done this. This one's gonna be focused on space utilization. Basically the concept is we get any sort of, uh, landlords, tenants, people who are interested in that to come talk about what they're trying to do with space utilization, how they're using it effectively, how they wanna use it effectively.
And the feedback that we've gotten is that we do like virtual breakout rooms during those people love them. We're even gonna make 'em smaller this time. So you're gonna be in a room with like. Four or five other, um, building owners who are interested in kind of the same technology for the same reasons as you and get [00:05:00] to talk through some of this stuff.
Um, so yeah, we're excited for that. Uh, it's free for any building owner to come join, uh, open Invite.
James Dice: Great. Yeah, and this is our third one. We started doing these. They're, they're building owners only a couple of demo, like quick demos from vendors where it's relevant, but building owners only. And it's, um, yeah, just a vulnerable place to share what, what you're working on.
Um. Nick, our special guest for today is Nick. Uh, go ahead and introduce yourself, Nick, and tell us what's going on, uh, in your world. Hey
Nicholas Dumoulin: everyone. Yeah. Name's, uh, Nick Ley. I am, uh, the senior manager for Smart Billing Technology with Dream Office. Uh, although I do work with our industrial and our multi-res reach as well.
Um, and yeah, I, uh, manage our smart building program at Dream and. Um, deal with all the day-to-day of our, uh, operational technology and building out standards and our capital deployments. So really the full cycle of all [00:06:00]these systems. So, um, what I've been working on lately is it's capital planning season, so not exciting, but this is when we start making all our pitches to get, uh, the funding and try to make the, the good arguments of, uh, why we should be investing in, in all this, uh, technology.
Um, so we're really identifying. Uh, which assets have the, the most critical issues, the ones that are affecting tenants the most, our operations teams, the most, our energy impact and kind of trying to summarize all those, um, different areas of impact and why we should be, uh, investing in some systems, uh, versus other.
And I. And all that kind of stuff. So that's taken a lot of time lately. Um, on the more nerdy side, um, we're getting pretty close to finishing up a pilot project, um, using lower wan wireless technology for, um, a bunch of use cases. But the primary one we're looking at right now is, is, uh, leak detection. So, um, but the idea is to, to do leak detection and then also just [00:07:00] validate the, the technology and the product, um, in particular.
Cool. So
James Dice: that's great. There's a bunch of vendors out there right now hoping that they were gonna be in Dreams Budget, and they're like scrambling now that you said that. Yep. You guys have two weeks. Thank you. All right, let's jump in to our first category, uh, here. Digitizing operations and maintenance. We had an article that I published a couple weeks back called, um, we Know Where the People Are.
Why doesn't the HVAC system, and this is why we wanted to bring you in, Nick. Um, basically you and you and I, and you and us, you and Nexus have been talking about this for damn near 18 months now. Um, you aren't the only one we've talked to about this, right? Um, we've heard from a lot of building owners that have looked at space utilization to tie in the event that's coming up in a couple weeks.
They've then wondered if I install these sensors to count people. Or I centralize my data [00:08:00] to understand where people are at. Why can't I then just take that, map that to my HVAC zones and reduce my conditioning of those spaces when there's reduced people or zero people in those spaces? And. I wrote an article about why that's too fucking hard to do and no one's doing it because it's just too complicated in three ways.
One is the business case is murky. Um, first cost is too high and ongoing cost is too high, sorry, vendors. Um, the second one is operational silos. So you often have, um. Workplace. People installing, people counting or the tenant in dreams case. Right. And then you have the landlord controlling the hvac. If you also have a property manager that's in there too, that's responsible for the control system.
Like now we have three different, sometimes parties, uh, that are. That, those are just some of them, right? Then you add in sustainability and you add in blah, blah. You [00:09:00] know, it, it gets pretty murky from there. So I interviewed Matt Sexton from VXP. I interviewed Butler R zero and OTI on the vendor side, and, uh, people should check out this article.
Um. Nick, tell us where you're at with this. Uh, you mentioned the lower WAN project, but I know you have had other, other, at least budgeting and piloting exercises around trying to figure out how to get your energy consumption down using people counting and mapping that to your HVAC zones.
Nicholas Dumoulin: So we pretty much started the process of just kind of seeing what technology is out there and, and working with Nexus Lab to see, um, both technology and vendors.
Because when it comes to people counting, there's a lot of different, like at the sensor level, there's a lot of different approaches you can take to people counting, um, everything from, you know, computer vision overlay on CCTB cameras to thermal, to motion to like time of flight. Like there's just a lot of.
[00:10:00] Fundamental hardware differences and then trying to understand what areas or applications each are stronger and more accurate in. It's really a lot to kind of sift through and try to understand at that core level. Um, and so we kind of want to understand and just how the business model is, like, how do these different vendors charge for this, uh, for.
Installing these, the, these, these sensors, um, was really core to understanding how do we. Build out a program around this and, and deploy at scale. Um, so we started there, we got the results back. Um, unfortunately, you know, a lot of vendors are really based on, um, SaaS fees, those annual fees, and as a landlord those are really hard to swallow.
Um. And kind of scale, especially when you're like comparing to a traditional building automation system where we spend the capital we put in the [00:11:00]system, and sure there's some ongoing maintenance costs, um, but for the most part, you're not paying like a subscription fee for the data you're collecting indefinitely, right?
Those sensors are installed. We own that data internal to our buildings, and we can do with. What we want, um, with it. So that was one of the big challenges. Um, from there, we identified an opportunity, uh, in one of our properties where we had recently upgraded, um, the lighting control system to be a fully, um, modern, um, lighting control system with occupancy sensors and day lighting.
Um, and it had a backnet, uh, option. To export the data out of that system. So we worked with our, uh, building automation vendor for HVAC controls and got them to, um, basically import the occupancy sensor data from the lighting control system, um, into the HVAC and set up our [00:12:00] occupancy based control. So, you know, just to be clear, this isn't people counting, it's just on off occupancy.
Um, but even with just with that, we are able to see really good results on. Um, this pilot. So, um, and, and there's a couple different reasons why I went through that strategy that we can get into as well later, so,
James Dice: yeah. Yeah. Well, one of the things that we helped you with is just engaging the vendor marketplace.
Right. And it stuck out to me, like thinking back on that process over a year ago. You were pretty strong in basically saying like, we can't, we have to minimize the ongoing costs or else this doesn't pencil. Right. For sure. And when we, when we engaged the marketplace, I think we only found, was it Brad? Was it one or two?
Maybe Just one. So
Brad Bonavida: one
James Dice: plus one with an
Brad Bonavida: asterisk maybe.
James Dice: Yeah. Yeah. One people accounting vendor basically, that didn't have an ongoing cost and it was an optional thing if you wanted to like add their [00:13:00] software onto it. Right. Um, and we have just been challenging the marketplace ever since that because it feels like, you know, that's a big part of the market that just doesn't wanna pay a SaaS fee.
They just want to use the data and especially for this use case, right? Um, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to. It's not really like in the history of controls, you've never had to pay a SaaS fee for a sensor that's in your control system. It's just a hardware device that plugs into your control system.
There's not really a SaaS component to it. Exactly. I think the marketplace is murky in that a lot of these startups are, um. Trying to provide space utilization as well. And so just, you know, chopping off that stack, device layer, application layer, there aren't a lot that are just trying to stay at the device layer, which is interesting.
Nicholas Dumoulin: Yeah, the feeling I get from it as well is like, these vendors are really geared towards tenants, like corporate and commercial tenants that are trying to [00:14:00] understand how to use their space, um, as a landlord. I don't really like, I mean this is gonna sound bad, but I don't really wanna give that information to my tenants so that they can decide, hey, downsize and rent less space from us.
Right? So our incentives aren't really aligned. Um, and I don't think a lot of people talk about that, but, um, you know, in that case, like, I think that's where really where those vendors are marketing to, I think they're not really geared towards landlords. Um, and the other thing they have to be very careful of is like a lot of the building automation manufacturers are now starting to release.
They're, they've been playing catch up, but they're starting to release their own people counting sensors or multi-sensor hubs and stuff like that to compete. And these will be, they don't have SaaS fees, they'll just integrate into your BS system. Um, so you know, that time period where they were kind of the leaders on the hardware side might.
[00:15:00] Uh, it might be coming to an end. So,
James Dice: yeah. And, and that happened in my interviews for this piece. So Brian Turner at OTI told me about a sensor that doesn't have SaaS fees, that's $400 a retail price. And he said this, and it's got IQ and people counting. And he was just basically like, this is, this is the standard.
It like a sensor needs to get down to that price. It needs to have optional SaaS or none. And that, that was his opinion. Right. Um, obviously there's still room for all of the providers that have. Software. If your software provides value, you should charge sasb.
Brad Bonavida: Yeah. Yeah. I was going to just say you're spot on with like the difference with the outcomes.
Because if you're going for space utilization and really knowing like your workplace and where people are at, those platforms that they're providing, add a ton of value because like, oh yeah, BAS can't provide those analytics. But when we're talking about this use case of like, you know, saving energy.
Maybe you can do it from your BAS and [00:16:00] I just, I have to, you have to give me an a second to engineering nerd out on this topic because I've gone really deep into it in past lives and it is just fascinating. I think a lot of people have seen the challenges in this, but I. Um, just quickly, the way that you know, you save the concept here is that people need outdoor air.
So you have more people, you need more outdoor air. You have to run your fan faster. Less people, you need less outdoor air. You run your fan less fast. And fans operate on the fan affinity law, which means that you're exponentially saving energy when you slow your fan down. It's not linear, it's exponential.
I think it's actually cubic, um. So the first problem is like you have to be able to change the speed of your fan to get that energy savings. And a lot of people don't realize that they have a single speed fan that can't even change, uh, speed, you know? So you gotta be able to modulate the speed, and then on top of that, quickly it gets really nasty when you get into heating and cooling mode.
Because if you're cooling a space, you're dehumidifying it and you're cooling the air, it's sensible cooling and [00:17:00] latent cooling. So if you slow the fan down too much because you're like, this is a big room, there's only one person in it, but it needs to be cooled, um, all of a sudden all you're doing is taking all the humidity outta the air and you're not actually lowering the temperature of the air.
Uh, so that gets super messy. And then heating as well. Let's say you have one person in the room and you don't need that much airflow. Well, hot air rises and if it's a big room and you're just barely pushing air into there, it's not actually getting to the bottom of the space and doing anything. So, uh, that, you know, we could go for an hour down that path, but it's just can get so complicated on the technical side.
And I know a lot of people were commenting on the article with how difficult it can be to figure that all out.
James Dice: Yeah. And there's the, also the zoning of the system. Like if you, if you can't turn down the system, it's the, um. Se like the schedules and sequences on the VAV box or whatever actually serves that zone.
It's, yeah, it's, there's, there's a lot of complexity around, and, and in the article, I challenged the design community, right? Because the design [00:18:00]community needs to be designing HVAC systems for this technology to be prevalent when it, when it becomes prevalent. Yeah. All right. Let's move on. Nick, do you have anything else to add on your project?
You wanna give us like a, where's the headed next?
Nicholas Dumoulin: Um, where's it heading next? Uh, not sure really. Uh, we're trying to find other assets where this would be applicable, where we have a, like ideally we leverage what's in place for the lighting controls and in the building automation. Like my strategy around this is, is actually twofold.
It, I'm trying to get investment both to upgrade our lighting control systems, to incorporate occupancy design or occupancy sensors. Um. Because a lot of them don't. Um, so that we get the savings on the lighting control. But since we. By and large move to LED lighting. The savings you get from just lighting alone is not as much as it used to.
So the value of those occupancy sensors for lighting controls is not as high as we would've used to see. [00:19:00] So by being able to say, Hey, we can attach this to our HVAC and actually get HVAC savings, which turns out to be more significant than the lighting savings nowadays. Um, that ROI piece. Makes that business case stronger.
Um, so that's one strategy I'm trying to, to employ internally to get that investment to, to do that. So, um, that's one approach we're looking at. Obviously we can just look at adding sensors directly to the, uh, HVAC controls, um, as, as another, uh, way that we can achieve this. So
James Dice: fascinating.
Let's go to energy Management performance controls. We had another article come out around what's still in the US at least. So, so Dream is in Canada. I don't know if we mentioned that. So next, next on in Toronto. Um, but we wrote an article about what's still driving decarbonization projects, um, in the US and um.
Just given everything [00:20:00] politically, it just basically decarb has turned into a bad word. We're, we're still gonna use that term at Nexus Labs, but it's definitely turned into a politicized word these days. Um, and I talked with, um, energy management vendors at Insight Grid and Mantis Innovations. And I was honestly inspired by what they told me, like it gave me more hope than I had before talking to them.
Um, if I can quickly summarize real quick, basically they said that it's just basically business as usual. Um, if you think about the tailwinds behind decarbonization that have happened, I. Over the last five years or so, all three of these companies had been doing it before those tailwinds. And so they, they basically were like, yeah, it's been nice having those tailwinds federally and politically over the last four years, five years, but we didn't need those before and we definitely don't need them still because these projects, like the fundamental drivers behind these projects.
Haven't really changed. And [00:21:00] so insight talked about how the healthcare sector and hospitality sectors are really taking off. Um, government still, they do a lot of government work, federal government work, and they're still getting a lot of that work because it's about cost savings. Thought that was interesting.
Um, grid Am primarily serves commercial real estate. So like the dreams of the world and. Um, they basically said that their software drives low and no cost, energy savings, improvements, and so their software is more popular than it ever was. It's growing faster than it ever was. They're seeing less retrofit projects than they they had before.
But what I thought was interesting is that all of the CRE landlords out there aren't necessarily, they're still developing like their roadmap. They might not implement it because they know where things are going. Long term is to decarbonize. They might not be as motivated near [00:22:00] term to actually do those projects, but they wanna understand their exposure, which I thought was interesting.
Um, mantis serves a lot of, um. Retail and corporate customers. So like they spoke with Dollar Tree at, at Nexus Con last year, and they, they had told some interesting stories around how maybe those tailwinds from the past few years, like, got some of these programs kickstarted. But now those programs have such critical mass and momentum that they're not going anywhere.
Um, and so they were basically like, we're, you know, we're, we're moving, we're moving along. So. I was, I was energized by that being someone that cares deeply about climate change and also cares deeply about, you know, getting this technology in installed, in, in buildings. Um, what did you guys think?
Nicholas Dumoulin: I think you're spot on, James.
Like, obviously I'm coming from a Canadian perspective, but that's exactly what I'm seeing from my, my side of the fence as well. Um, our sustainability teams and like internally, were really, and. My team is, is responsible [00:23:00] for really deploying those capital for our decarbonization plan. So very integrated into that.
And yeah, it, there's a slowdown, but we're not, we're still doing a lot of the work that we were doing a couple years later and we're still in the, like still planning, strategizing and making sure we're as prepared as we can be when the capital is there. Um, and once the will is there to go. Right. And, um, yeah, I mean we, April 1st.
Our carbon, uh, tax also got canceled by the federal government. So the cost for like carbon emissions is, uh, not being priced in, um, in the Canadian market right now. Um, so that's just similar to you guys. We have like headwinds that's affecting, um, how we go about this. So,
Brad Bonavida: Nick, is there like a particular.
Building performance energy standard that you guys care about the most? Like was it that carbon tax that you just said got lifted or what are you guys looking at? I. Mainly when you're trying to meet [00:24:00] a certain level of efficiency.
Nicholas Dumoulin: That is more of a question for my sustainability team, but we do like extensive reporting.
That's pretty much in line with what you would probably see in the us. So I think gresb Energy star, like they're, they're going after all the same kind of lead, like all these different programs. Which one's the most important to us? Uh, I'm not entirely sure. Yeah. But, um, it's generally what the market's looking for, what tenants are, are looking for.
Investors are looking for. Right to make decisions. They don't, I would say care less about whether it's in Canada or US, or those are separate kind of decisions. But in terms of the performance of the building, we rate it the same way. We're pretty similar here to, you know, the US market in that regard.
James Dice: Yeah. Yeah. Tenants want low carbon space. Investors want lower carbon investments. Yep. Um, cool. I
Brad Bonavida: think that the, the silver lining is like, I love. The, the take that you kind of, uh, the, what I took outta the article, James, is like this alignment of. If it's not decarb standards that are [00:25:00] being, or regulations that are being pushed, it's aligning, saving money on your utility bill and having a more reliable energy source with also decarbonizing.
And like when you can get sustainability aligned with also like the bottom dollar of your utility savings, then everybody is on the same team without a doubt. Um, so That's great. Oh, and I also wanted to point out, um. Um, we, we have a comment section now in, uh, the Nexus Lab's website. So James, I know you and I were kind talking, Maggie, read my
Rosy Khalife: mind.
Good job. Thank you for bringing that up.
Brad Bonavida: Thanks. Thanks to you, Rosie, for getting that in there.
Rosy Khalife: Yeah.
Brad Bonavida: Um, but James, you had this, I think it's a, it's
James Dice: a little bit of a, like a peak under the hood of like how many things the three of us are actually doing on a day-to-day basis. Like we changed websites like two years ago.
And for some reason the new website didn't have comments, the old did, and we just have too much going on to where like, we just never solved that problem. And like, if you like commenting on our stuff, we're sorry about that. But like, it just shows how [00:26:00] smaller things like that don't necessarily make it to the top of our to-do list.
So, sorry, but Rosie, Rosie made it happen on a, on a whim a couple weeks ago. Well done.
Brad Bonavida: Thank you. It's, it's great 'cause you can go in and like this one, I live in Colorado, obviously, James, you and I both. So I was very interested when he talked about the lawsuit against the, um, standards in Colorado. And just, I, you know, we're talking in the comments that the latest on that is that, uh, I guess they didn't prove that you actually had to replace equipment in order to meet the new standards.
So the lawsuit got thrown out temporarily. Like you can meet the standards in Colorado without having to replace equipment. So they were like, okay, this, you can do this. You don't, this is no good case to not have these standards.
James Dice: Well, what's hilarious is I just saw that with Brad and I didn't immediately make the connection that that was you.
Um, comment. Now I know that was you.
Rosy Khalife: Yeah. I read James' reply to you and it was like, thanks Brad and I, and I knew it was you that had commented that.
Brad Bonavida: [00:27:00] Oh. 'cause it doesn't say my name, my full name.
Rosy Khalife: No, I mean it should say your name. It should say your name, but I dunno if it says your last name.
James Dice: I was like, oh, we have some other Brad in Colorado.
Well, there's a bunch of other comments on the other
Brad Bonavida: articles too, so people have to check it out, get involved
James Dice: so people feel free to comment on the articles. I loved, um, last podcast we had Chris from Walmart and he like disagreed with something I wrote, which is great. And I'd, I'd love to see more disagreement in the, in the, in the bring
Rosy Khalife: the spice, people
James Dice: bring the spice.
Let's go to ot. So integrating, connecting and securing devices. Brad, you're gonna, uh, tee something up for us here?
Brad Bonavida: Yeah, we got a clip from last year's Nexus Con. Uh, this is, uh, from two 70 Park Avenue. So JP Morgan Chase's building in New York City. Uh, Mike Crawl is talking about it. This building is 2.5 million square feet.
It's the highest occupied floor in New York City. It's a hundred percent electric. [00:28:00] It's, uh, sourced from renewable power. It's really cool. But he's talking about, you know, a big part about doing that is getting smarts into the building. And that's hard because you don't know if you're gonna break a building when you put new smart things into it.
So he's gonna explain the boat.
James Dice: By the way, real quick, before you press play, I was with. Michael in January and he gave me a tour of this lab that they have that he's gonna talk about. Uh, and let me
say it is, it is awesome. So what we've done in part because we were able to do, uh, a lot of this initial testing and, and create a lab for ourselves is we are creating what, what we've termed, I'm very proud of this one, the boat, it's the building operations acceptance testing environment.
Right? Like in software development, you'd have a UAT, we have a, a boat. My plan as we move in is no version of a device or software will be tested, will be pushed to the building until it is pushed into the boat and we rock the boat that we smoke test or [00:29:00] 'cause. Not only do we need to depend on the fact that it's not gonna brick the controller that's out in the field and have to have us go out and somebody press that hard reset button on it, but we're building integrations to all these things and we're building downstream and upstream dependencies on all these things.
I need to make sure that those don't check change either. I can't have an integration break because some, some vet pushed a new firmware version to their device and it somehow changed that their API or their backnet was, was configured. So we are actually scheduling our, our testing in the boat before we do anything to the building.
James Dice: I love seeing the look on Andy Schoenberg's face when he set the boat. It was like such a nerdy reaction that was like, I love this acronym so much from Andy. It was funny. So thank you Michael, for presenting that at the conference. I think
Brad Bonavida: it's, it's so applicable to Nick and James, what you guys were just talking about with the occupancy based ventilation control.
Like that's an example of integrating. Multiple systems together. And [00:30:00]imagine you have that turned all the way up on like one of the smartest buildings in New York City and you've got space booking, talking to occupancy, talking to hvac, talking to lighting, and all of a sudden you're like, space booking company changes firmwares.
And now none of it works. Like that's what he's talking about is when you build more integrations, it matters a heck of a lot more when someone tweaks a little thing. 'cause it has so much downstream effect. I just really appreciate the way you explained to the boat and how they're testing things out like that.
James Dice: I wish I could talk about all the things that he told me on that tour that I can't talk about. I wish we could publish all, everything going on behind the scenes in that project because it, it, they open in August or September or something like that. So that project is still ongoing. And so all of the smart building vendor selections and competitions and all the stuff that's happening behind the scenes that we can't publish, uh, is really, really fascinating because of how big, just how.
That project is. Thank you Michael. Um, alright, let's, next section. Rosie's ran adding [00:31:00] this in this time. Go ahead.
Brad Bonavida: I'll, I'll tee this up. I'll tee this up. So Rosie has done, maybe some of you have seen it, she's posted some of these on LinkedIn, but basically. James and I get this behind the scenes look, I feel like of Rosie, of she's got startup experience, she's got marketing experience in like IOT and in smart buildings and she'll see something that doesn't make sense or isn't quite right and she'll get really passionate about it.
So we call it Rosie's Rants. So we're introducing it here to the podcast of Rosie's rants. Uh, what do you think, James? You wanna add anything before she go? She goes off on, on it.
James Dice: I sometimes call them bursts. She, she like, right. Too much energy to hold and it just bursts out. Bursts out. So go ahead Rosie.
Thank you guys. We really, really set you up here.
Rosy Khalife: Really did. Um, thank you for the support and for seeing me for who I am. So lately, I mean, there's so much to talk about, but we'll jump into Juan. We'll hopefully do one of these on each episode. But Brad [00:32:00] and I and James get to see so many demos as you know.
From, from vendors, and we get to talk to building owners on the flip side. And so we're constantly hearing like, it's almost like we have two different sides in our ears, one in the side, one on the other side, you know, sharing their reactions to what they're seeing and their day-to-day jobs. And so one that's come up a few times is the disconnect that is often happening between product teams on the vendor side, product teams, the marketers that are trying to sell or market the solutions.
And then how building owners are then being sold to. And so there's these three kind of sides. So we have the building owners, we have the salespeople at the, on the vendor side, we have the marketers on the vendor side, and then we have the actual product people that are creating these solutions. And so if you think of those four types of stakeholders, they are often saying.
All different things, all four of them. Right. And so I think there's a, there's a somewhat of a problem. I've been in a few calls lately [00:33:00] where it, on the call there was a product person, there was a sales team, and then there was the marketing people. And on that same call. There was disconnects of what they were each saying on that, on just the one call that we're part of.
And so imagine if you are a building owner and you're hearing this, it's, it's very confusing. So I think it results in confused buyers. It results in stalled implementations. It results in creating more of a trust problem from the building owner side. You know, when they do actually do go to implement a solution.
So I was trying to figure out like, you know, how do we fix this? What, what do we do? And I think at, at the very least, we need to bring all of those stakeholders together in the same room. Like marketers should be hearing what building owners are saying, not just hearing that from the sales team. And same goes for product and so on.
And so how do we do that? We need to bring them all together, you know, on one table. And so luckily we get to do that at Nexus Con. That's just a snippet, a moment in [00:34:00] time, but we need to keep doing that, you know? Throughout the year. So James, uh, Nick, Brad, anyone have anything to share about this?
James Dice: Well, we have a, we have a very specific partner I'm thinking of right now, who, um, their marketing people are completely frozen because those other groups you mentioned haven't like, decided what their strategy is for like, who they're targeting, what message, like what their product is doing this year that they wanna highlight.
And so. It's just like the marketing people are a little bit handcuffed sometimes.
Brad Bonavida: But then James, we have another partner who is in the exact opposite situation, I think, where, uh, talking to their marketing group, they're like, oh, should we just pivot and say it like this or say it like that? And they're talking about these like.
Existent existential changes that like if the product person were here and they heard you saying that you're gonna just turn around and describe it the other way, like it doesn't do that right now. So like that would take a year of engineering to make it do that. So it goes [00:35:00] both ways for sure.
James Dice: Yeah. It is, it's fascinating.
Cool. Good
Brad Bonavida: stuff. Preach, Rosie.
James Dice: Alright, let's, let's wrap this up. Thank you Rosie, for your rant. Let's go to carve outs. Um, so something fun, more personal about you, um, what you read, listened to what you did last weekend, et cetera. Brad, you go first.
Brad Bonavida: Okay. Quickly. I, I already shared this with you guys, but I'm really proud.
Uh, I, I live really close to the headwaters of the Arkansas River. It's like peak rafting season right now. It's a really big part of the community. I am not a rafter. I have like very, I've gone like twice in my life, but this last weekend I had a friend who let me, uh, like. Quote unquote guide for the first time.
So I sat in the back of a raft with five other people in it and was in charge of steering and telling everyone else when to row and I didn't flip us. Um, so it was awesome. It was a really fun experience.
Rosy Khalife: Nice job's. Brad.
James Dice: I have a story that that ties onto that. Last summer I went to [00:36:00] Durango to visit Dennis Krieger, who works for Clockworks Analytics, and him and I rafted down.
What's the, the animus. Is that what it's called? Yeah, the animus. And, um, we ran into the bridge and I got thrown out of our raft, like airborne sort of thing. And Dennis is like a hero. He like, mid-air, grabs me and pulls me back into the boat. So, so wait, did
Rosy Khalife: Dennis save your life?
James Dice: No, I would've just like swam, but I, I wouldn't have been in the RAF with him anymore.
Didn't, I would've had to like swim to the side of the river.
Rosy Khalife: Oh, okay. Okay.
James Dice: Yeah.
Rosy Khalife: Wow. What'd you say, Nick?
James Dice: Did you touch water at any point? Oh, I was like half, I was my waist. I was waist deep in water. Wow. And he, he grabbed me and like, I don't know.
Brad Bonavida: It's pro. That's awesome. And
James Dice: what I found out afterwards, I'm just giving Dennis so much shit right now.
Hopefully he listens to this. What I found out afterwards is he had just got this raft and he was too scared to take his, [00:37:00] his wife and son on this. So I was the Guinea pig. Nice. And so I was, I did my job actually. I think I did my job. Definitely. Um, okay. My carve out is, um, Bon of Air's new album. Um, it's called Sable Fable.
And if you think of anybody who's listened to Bon Air in the past, it's like sad wintery songs and like lots of emotion to them. And this is him like. A little bit happier and like, kind of like Springtime Bone Bear. And I just wanna say, I've listened to this album, I think at Spotify at the year end, it's gonna be like, are you okay?
Like, are, is it, is everything okay with you? Like, I've listened to this album so many times, it's crazy.
Rosy Khalife: That's awesome. Cool. So check it
James Dice: out.
Rosy Khalife: Cool.
James Dice: Nick, what's yours?
Nicholas Dumoulin: Uh, mine is, uh, I bought a house, uh, in September, my first home and just started our. First, like big renovation project to decarbonize the house.
Cool. Um, so sustainability, carbon, cl, uh, you know, climate change. Very, uh, also [00:38:00] very passionate about that for myself. So I'm excited to kind of go through that journey. And the work has officially begun. We've, we've started demo this, uh, this past week. So, um, away we go. What's the project? Sorry.
James Dice: What's the project?
What's the, is it water heater or furnace or,
Nicholas Dumoulin: uh, furnace? Hot water heater. We replaced the oven when we moved in 'cause the oven was natural gas, but the, the oven did not work. Um, so had to put in the two 20 plug to get an induction stove in. So that's already been done, but we're getting rid of the last couple.
Of natural gas appliances and then we're like re insulating the whole basement. 'cause there's no insulation in the basement. It's a hundred year old house. Um, so we're open up walls and finding lots of, uh, fun surprises, um, along with that. But yeah, we're trying to improve the building envelope, all that fun stuff.
So Love it.
James Dice: Love that. Been down that road before as well. Rosie, what's yours? All
Rosy Khalife: right. My [00:39:00] carve out is a company called Swim Zip. So when I was on Shark Tank at the time of filming, there was a woman there, her name's Betsy Johnson. She started a, a swim line that had SPF in it. And at the time I didn't have any kids and so it wasn't, you know, I didn't, I didn't need the product, but I just bought it recently from my little guy.
And it is amazing. Highly recommend. And guess what? I'm actually gonna buy it for myself. 'cause it's that good. You don't need to put a sunscreen on. It's called swim zip
James Dice: because this thing covers your whole body.
Rosy Khalife: No, Y yeah. I mean, yeah, kind of.
James Dice: So it's
Brad Bonavida: like a wet,
Rosy Khalife: it doesn't have to. It doesn't have to, but that's the one I got.
The long sleeve, like as long. It's great though, and it's such great prints. So check it out. And they have, for adults and kids, does
James Dice: hold on every piece of clothes. You just wanna block all the sun. Is that
Rosy Khalife: just like some of the sun so you don't get burned? It's awesome. Check out out.
Brad Bonavida: Doesn't all don't, don't all clothes block from getting sunburned [00:40:00] though.
Rosy Khalife: No, they don't. Actually, Brad. They don't. Okay. Yeah.
Brad Bonavida: Why would sunscreen, sunscreen on below my clothes?
Rosy Khalife: You're supposed to. Yeah. I swear to God. No. I What A summer
Nicholas Dumoulin: is to not have as much clothes on.
Rosy Khalife: Guys, we're, we're making jokes of a reals topic. That's actually important. It's a legit thing. It's real. I'm
Nicholas Dumoulin: a ginger.
James Dice: I understand.
Rosy Khalife: Okay, thank you. I
James Dice: think
Rosy Khalife: I
James Dice: just would like if, if I have to never see the sun again on my skin, I would just, I just give me skin cancer. It's fine.
Rosy Khalife: No,
James Dice: sorry. Alright, that's a great place to end. Thank you Nick, for joining us. Thank you Nick. You all in two weeks. Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for.
Rosy Khalife: Okay, friends, thank you for listening to this episode. As we continue to grow our global community of change makers, we need your help. For the next couple of months, we're challenging our listeners to share a link to their favorite Nexus episode on LinkedIn with a short post about why you listen. It would really, really help us out.
Make sure to tag us in the [00:41:00] post so we can see it. Have a good one.
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This is a great piece!
I agree.