Controls-Con, presented by Cochrane Supply on May 5-7, 2021, discussed the impact of smart controls on the building industry.

HVAC has a critical role to play in the future of building automation and digitalization.

Small- to medium-sized buildings make up about 94% of all commercial buildings in the U.S., according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, yet only 13% of those buildings have a building automation system.

Here are some of the top benefits of commercial HVAC automation and how new technology may soon make automated systems even more valuable.

Trends at this year’s AHR Expo within commercial controls and building automation were improving energy efficiency, making buildings more adaptable, streamlining workflow to make things easier for HVACR contractors, and a greater emphasis on cybersecurity and digitization.

The lab is designed to give students hands-on experience that will help them bridge the gap between classroom instruction and the needs of employers.

When it comes to this piece of critical infrastructure, operators need to be prepared to face new and sophisticated attacks.

The expected surge in smart thermostat sales will have equipment manufacturers, many of whom have their own proprietary controls, competing with the well-known universal thermostat brands, such as Nest, Honeywell, and ecobee.

Dick Foster has been preaching the positives of zoning for years. As the owner of ZoneFirst, he has dedicated his life and career to this technology, and it has been a bit of an uphill battle.

Customer comfort is the top sales driver in the HVAC industry, or at least it should be.

How many of standard HVAC sales include add-ons like a humidifier, air cleaner, HRV/ERV, UV lights, or zoning?

Products are emerging that help simplify homeownership.

For years, ZoneFirst President Dick Foster has used the light-switches-in-the-home comparison while promoting the benefits of zoning. At their AHR Expo booth, they introduced a product that brought new meaning to that comparison.

At this year’s AHR Expo, Fujitsu presented the ways it can make the pandemic’s new way of living more comfortable.

“The acquisition of California Economizer and its Zonex Systems brings together the two oldest manufacturers of zoning dampers and zone-control systems,” said Dick Foster, the president of Zonefirst and its parent company, Trolex Corp.

With cost reduction, sustainability enablement, increased comfort and performance benefits, VRF systems allow commercial buildings to gain a competitive advantage by reducing their carbon footprint and providing custom comfort to occupants.

Posted by Gordon Fyodor Lyon on Oct 05

Variable-speed heat pumps, which dominate the heat pump market in many countries, are getting more attention in the U.S. The NEWS asked several manufacturers about the benefits of the technology.

The DOE's new Rooftop Accelerator program encourages manufacturers to develop efficient commercial rooftop heat pumps for cold climates, which could reduce GHG emissions and energy costs by up to 50%.

With “heat pump” and “incentives” almost being synonymous at this point, contractors need to understand the basics to ensure customers are receiving the benefits.

BlocPower, a climate technology company focused on greening America's buildings, announced a fundraising round of $150 million, including more than $24 million of Series B corporate equity led by VoLo Earth Ventures and $130 million of debt financing led by Goldman Sachs.

Throughout March, voters will help the staff at Peterman Brothers select four charity partner organizations for 2023.

Residential gas furnaces must all have a minimum AFUE of 95% beginning in five years. Some in the HVAC industry say the new Department of Energy rule will ultimately hurt homeowners.

A homeowner in Pickering, Ontario works with an experienced HVAC pro to improve comfort, efficiency, and energy savings with a high-efficiency hydronic forced-air furnace upgrade.

Posted by Ciro Santilli OurBigBook via dev on Sep 17

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This is the first of a series of Episodes on Software Architecture. Alex, Michael and Markus talk about rather fundamental topics in this episode, we'll go into much more detail in subsequent episodes in that series. Topics in this episode include:

• What is architecture, how is it different from design
• what different kinds of architecture are there in addition to software architecture
• the role of the architect, do we have one or more?
• architecture in agile software development
• tasks of the architect
• architect vs. the technical project lead
• architecture and project politics
• architecture requirements, estimating, team assembling

In this Episode, Michael and Markus continue the discussion about the fundamentals of software architecture (we're doing it without Alex, because it is really hard to find a suitable time for all of us on the phone :-)). We talk about the various quality attributes (such as performance, scalability, maintainability and many more) and how they relate to each other.

SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) appears to be just another hype - after all we have been building distributed systems for quite a while now. But the real value of SOA is non-technical. In this episode Eberhard and Markus discuss the advantages and disadvantages, what SOA actually is and how it compares to other approaches that have been tried out before.

In this third Episode on software architecture, Michael and Markus talk about the basic tools that an architect uses when architecting systems. These tools include things like separation, abstraction, compression and sharing. We also relate these tools to the quality attributes we introduced in previous archtecture episodes.

In this, as well as in the next episode Eberhard and Markus continue their discussion about SOA (the episode got too long, so we had to split it into two ... SOA 2a and SOA 2b). In this episode, we talk about the various perspectives on SOA (CBD, EAI, BPM), about fundamental requirements towards an SOA, and we discuss the role of models in defining sustainable architectures. We also discuss how a programming model based on the described approach typically looks like. We then discuss a number of issues any large-scale SOA faces (and for which the SOA paradigm does not really provide an out-of-the-box solution: In this episode we discuss data type ownership and (weak) typing of data types.

This is the second snippet of the SOA 2 double-episode. Eberhard and Markus continue the discussion with the issue of service reuse and a couple of development process issues. We also look at the duality between infrastructure development and application development in the context of an SOA. We then discuss the great spaghetti misunderstanding :-). We conclude this episode with a look at how to integrate BPM into the conceptual SOA framework we've built up to now, and we'll also briefly skim over a number of technologies related to SOA. Note that this episode, as well as the last one, is based on a set of slides; these can be downloaded from here. This episode covers slides 39 through 74.

In this episode Markus and our Guest Andy Longshaw talk about enterprise architecture. More specifically, we talk about some of the patterns in Andy Longshaw's and Paul Dyson's book Architecting Enterprise Solutions: Patterns for High-Capability Internet-based Systems. These includes things like replication, load balancing, monitoring and application management.

This is the fourth and final episode on the fundamentals of Software Architecture. We talk mainly about architectural styles and patterns, as introduced in the POSA 1 Book. We also discuss a little bit the process of actually using those patterns for architecting systems.

In this Episode we talked about the new POSA 4 book which has recently been published. We talk to two of the authors, Kevlin Henney and Frank Buschmann (the third author, Doug Schmidt was not available - and he had also been on the podcast a couple of times :-)). The book contains a pattern language for distributed systems. It contains 114 patterns that had been published before by many different other authors. The patterns have been rewritten to form a consistent language. We basically talked through the different sections of the book, which gives a really good overview over the challenges and the solutions of building distributed systems. These sections include From Mud to Structure, Distribution Infrastructure, Event Demultiplexing and Dispatching, Interface Partitioning, Component Patitioning, Application Contrl, Concurrency, Synchronization, Object Interaction, Adaptazion and Extension, Modal Behaviour, Resource Management and finally, Database Access. The book references several other previous works (as listed below). Interestingly, many of these referenced works and authors have also been discussed previously on the podcast. Here are the back references:

• Domain Driven Design, Eric Evans
• Messaging Patterns, Gregor Hohpe
• POSA 2 Patterns, Doug Schmidt
• Concurrency: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and the interview with Goetz and Holmes
• Remoting Patterns Part 1 and Part 2
• POSA3, Resource Management

In this episode we talk about the relationship between software architecture and the business. Based on his book, Beyond Software Architecture we discuss how things such as branding, licensing, updating or different deployment scenarios influence the technical architecture of a system. We also discuss issues such as portability that add a huge amount of complexity, although from a business perspective it often does not make much sense. In the second part of the interview we discuss how the technical team and the business team can improve the way they work together. We look at some of the games (such as Buy a Feature or Give them a Hot Tub) from his new book Innovation Games, which discusses how to use collaborative play to be more creative and innovative in product creation.

This episode features an interview with the software security expert Gary McGraw. Gary explains why this topic is so important and gives several security deficiencies examples that he found in the past. The second half of the interview is about his latest book 'Exploiting Online Games' where he explains how online games are hacked and why this is relevant to everybody, not only gamers in their 'First Life'.

In this episode we talk with Gerard Meszaros about problems and challenges doing unit testing in real-world projects. Starting from a short discussion about the importance of automated unit testing we spend most of this episode to talk about every day problems doing unit testing and how those problems can be solved. Based on this book on xunit testing patterns, Gerard talks about his experiences with unit test smells as an analogy to code smells. He describes an impressive set of unit testing patterns to overcome those difficult testing situations and illustrates them with nice examples everybody doing unit testing will feel familiar with.

This episode is a conversation with Bruce Powel Douglass on real time systems. We started by discussing what real time software is, and explored the difference between hard and soft real time. We then looked at different scheduling strategies, and the meaning of terms like urgency and importance in the context of scheduling. Next was a discussion of typical architectural styles for real time systems and how architectures are described in this context. This led us to a discussion about the importance of modeling, formalisms and languages as well as the role of automatic code generation from those models. We then looked at how to model QoS aspects and the role of SysML for modeling real time systems. We then had a brief look at which programming languages are used these days for real time systems and the role of static analysis to determine various properties of those programs in advance. The last part of the discussion focused on some best practices for building real time systems, the challenges in distributed real time systems and how real time systems can be tested effectively.

Enterprise Architecture is already common practice in most Fortune 100 companies. As the topic is comparably young, knowledge about it is not so widespread in the Software Architects Community, who deals mostly with project architectures. In this episode Alex speaks with Wolfgang Keller who has practical experience as an enterprise architect and has written a book on the topic. He is a Partner with BusinessGlue Consulting. They are specializing in the relationship between EAM and SOA. This episode gives a rough overview what Enterprise Architecture actually is touches the standards in the field and also gives hints on the practical work of Enterprise Architects.

In this special Episode we briefly discuss our new website. We will migrate to our new website during the coming week. If you experience any difficulties, contact the team or temporarily go to the old site at seradio.libsyn.com.

In this Episode we discuss fault tolerance based on the new book by Bob Hanmer. This is the actually the first part of the discussion, the remainder will be published in the next episode of SE Radio. We start by discussing some of the context for fault tolerant systems and the imperfect world assumption. We then discuss a number of terms we will need when discussing the fault tolerance patterns. We then discuss the fault tolerance mindset and connect fault tolerance to a number of related subject areas, such as software quality. We then discuss the shared context for the patterns that follow, among them the important observation that fault tolerance does not come for free! Finally we provide an overview over the different sections covered in the book and start the detailed discussion of the patterns by looking at the Architectural Patterns section. The next episode will discuss the remaining patterns in the book.