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Building management system is one of those phrases that means whatever the last supplier used it to mean. It can describe a single controller running an air handling unit, or a supervisory layer watching a whole estate.

Three of our buildings show the range clearly, because none of them needed the same thing.

A mosque that fills five times a day

The mosque on Ras Ghurab Island is a building with an unusual load profile. It is close to empty for most of the day and full within a few minutes, five times over, every day. Cooling a space like that on a fixed schedule is either wasteful for most of the day or inadequate at exactly the moment it matters.

That is a control problem before it is an energy problem, and it is why the direct digital control panel exists. The plant has to respond to occupancy and to the outside temperature rather than to a timer, and somebody has to be able to see whether it did.

The other characteristic of a building like this is that it cannot be taken out of service. There is no shutdown window for a mosque, so the controls go in around the building's use, not the other way round.

A learning centre where the chiller was the problem

At the MLC and MEA learning centre for Schlumberger the scope was BMS and chiller modification together, which is the honest way to describe most building energy work.

Chilled water plant is where the consumption is in a building of that kind, and it is also where the easiest savings hide. Plant is commonly commissioned to a design condition and then left there for years, running at a fixed set point against a load that varies by hour and by season. Modifying the chiller control so it tracks the actual load, and giving the operator visibility of what it is doing, is a smaller job than replacing equipment and usually returns more.

The lesson that generalises: when a client asks for a BMS because their energy bill is high, the answer is rarely more sensors. It is usually the chiller.

An office block that had to prove it

The G plus two office building at KIZAD carried three related but distinct systems: energy monitoring for Estidama, a building management system, and lighting control.

Estidama changes the question. A conventional BMS has to run the building well. An Estidama compliant installation has to demonstrate how the building ran, which means metering at a granularity that lets consumption be attributed by system and by tenancy rather than totalled at the incomer.

That is a design stage decision. Retrofitting attribution into a finished building means finding circuits that were never separated, and it is far more expensive than specifying the meters correctly at the outset. We did the same class of work at Al Tala Board's manufacturing plant at KIZAD, where centralised energy and water metering was the whole scope.

Where the BMS stops and the energy system starts

These two get conflated constantly, and the distinction is worth holding.

The BMS operates. It decides when a pump runs and what a valve does, and its success is measured in comfort and in plant that lasts.

The energy system accounts. It measures what that plant consumed and turns it into something an owner can act on, and its success is measured in decisions taken.

They share cabling and often share hardware, which is why they end up in one contract. They do not share a purpose. On the Abu Dhabi Investment Council work at Al Bahr Towers the energy management and electrical network monitoring systems are the accounting layer for a building whose operation is handled separately, and that separation is deliberate.

What makes these projects fail

Three things, consistently, and none of them are technical.

Nobody owns the system after handover. A BMS with no owner reverts to manual within about a year, because the first time a schedule is wrong somebody puts a plant item into hand and never puts it back.

The alarm list was built from the equipment schedule. Alarm every possible point and the operator learns to ignore all of them. The list should come from the decisions the operator actually has to make.

The graphics describe the drawings, not the building. If the mimic does not match what a person sees when they walk the plant room, they will stop using it.

Working with us

Almafor delivers building management, chiller and plant control, lighting control, and Estidama compliant energy and water metering across Abu Dhabi and the wider UAE, as a controls specialist inside an MEP package or as the whole scope. The panels are built and factory tested at our workshop in Mussafah.

Call +971 55 954 5801 or email info@almafor.com.

Common questions

Questions we are asked about this

What does a building management system actually control?

Typically air conditioning and ventilation, the chilled water plant, pumps, lighting circuits, and the monitoring of everything else: electrical distribution, water, fire and life safety status. The controlling is usually the easy half. The useful half is that somebody can see what the building is doing without walking it.

What is the difference between a BMS and an energy management system?

A BMS operates the plant. An energy management system measures what that plant consumed and turns it into something an owner can act on. They overlap and often share hardware, but they answer different questions: one is how do I run the building, the other is what did running it cost and where did it go.

What does Estidama require in terms of metering?

In practice, that consumption is measured at a level of detail that lets it be attributed rather than just totalled: separate energy and water metering by system and by tenancy, brought back to a central point and recorded. Retrofitting that into a finished building is considerably harder than designing it in, which is why it should be settled at design stage.

Can a BMS be added to a building that is already occupied?

Yes, and most of ours are. The work is staged around occupancy, controllers are installed and proven alongside the existing controls before anything is transferred, and each system is cut over separately. A mosque or a learning centre cannot be closed for a control system.

Do you work as a subcontractor to the MEP contractor?

Often, yes. On buildings we are usually the controls and instrumentation specialist inside a larger MEP package, and we are comfortable working to another engineer's design. We also take the whole scope where the client prefers a single point of responsibility.

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