I love that I have taken humanity’s oldest technology and complicated it to the point where I have the same problems as the buildings running our very newest technology. Makes a good brisket though.
I would offer that instead of monitoring the reactive egress of the devices purpose, thermal deltas, that one instead monitors the proactive ingress of what it needs to function to produce those thermal deltas, Alternating Current. If the devices native monitoring does not offer taps for voltage and amperage consumption then adding this before each device should be considered, certainly in data centers as some here have direct experience with HVAC failures and remaining on site for days to keep the uptime up. As a typical energy consuming device ages one can derive and relate many reactive events over time from proactive energy monitoring and in doing so one is certain to learn something new.
Edit: the user you were replying to was using AC as an abbreviation for air conditioner, not alternating current.
steventhedev•6mo ago
1. If the sensor dies and there is no data at all
2. If the sensor gets stuck (giving same value)
3. If the sensor slowly drifts (adjusting for daily, weekly, and yearly seasons) - indicating a clogged filter or leaking refrigerant
4. Statistical spikes - this is the hardest to tune so you need to treat it as a model that detects anomalies and it takes a long time to label extremely rare events
5. Static thresholds, over varying windows to deal with sensor error and transient spikes.
It also raises questions like "if the sensor is reporting 400C then either the building is on fire or the sensor is broken", or "how do we get the alert if the building is indeed on fire" and the inevitable followup: do we even need to get an alert if the building is on literal fire?
quickthrowman•6mo ago
Haha, I was looking at a BAS front end with a customer and we were trying to figure out why an air handler kept tripping out. The return air duct static pressure sensor was reading 65536 kpa, so either the sensor was faulty or the building was moments away from being vaporized in a massive explosion. Replacing the sensor corrected the issue and hundreds of lives were saved ;)