[edwcross]

I worked in a building that had that kind of "smart" controls. It was anything but.

In practice, it started opening and closing shutters for no reason, when clouds obscured the sun, and then went away. Or even when some sort of reflection hit some sensor, somewhere in the building.

I'm sure it's doable, but unlike factories, where automation is related to income and thus profits, most commercial buildings are built by the cheapest of cheaters, and so they will skimp on sensor, on intelligence, on integration, or whatever, just to follow the minimally-compliant features. So you get all kinds of erratic behavior, lack of redundancy, stupid intelligence that ends up overridden by humans.

[Animats]

Right. It works for hotels, because, if your hotel conference rooms are uncomfortable, some conferences will switch hotels next year. So there's a strong business case for getting HVAC control right.

Schools and colleges have the same HVAC problem, with huge variations in people load, but don't have the same incentive to get it right.

(I once found a computer room in the Gates Building at Stanford that had two packaged air conditioning systems at opposite ends of the room. One was heating and the other was cooling. You're supposed to get a control box that synchronizes your HVAC units when you have more than one, but they didn't. Each was running on its own thermostat. Huge energy consumption with an error like that.)