AHR industry leverages IoT

Last week I blogged to walk the talk, and getting on with IoT. I came across a blog post covering the AHR Expo – AHR is show focused on air conditioning, heating and refrigeration expo. Nest after being acquired by Google last year made HVAC, Thermostats and IoT popular. The acquisition was a major driver in throwing visibility on IoT. The reality, though, was that thermostats (and hence HVAC) were being enabled by IoT for quite sometime. But I digress…

Businesses of all sizes use HVAC, Refrigeration and Building Automation. And companies such as Honeywell, Schneider, Daiken, and Rheem have been enabling their products to be smart and connected. HVAC and Building Automation systems are installed & maintained, typically, by third parties. The third party integrators, contractors form the backbone of this business.

A sign of success is when contractors who install these “AHR” systems, and support them for repairs and maintenance – are benefitting from enabling smart connectivity on the systems. This leads to a win-win for both the contractors and the consumers or business owners. First step is to enable smart connectivity to their equipment, next step is to train and make the IoT-enabled tools available to the contractors.

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Programmable Thermostats

Yes, Nest is going to revolutionize, and jazz up the world of thermostats. But if you want something more legacy looking, and a bit more affordable and connected look at the Radio Thermostat Company of America (RTCOA) which has been around for 30 years. RTCOA offers three versions of “connected” thermostats: WiFi, Zigbee and ZWave. And to manage their designs/SKUs they have adopted USNAP. I believe leveraging USNAP was a fantastic idea – without introducing new models – the same model can accommodate support for multiple connectivity standards.

I have tried both the WiFi and Zigbee versions of the CT-30 model of their thermostat. The WiFi version appears to be powered by Marvell WiFi Controllers and RTCOA has made the APIs and discovery protocol available to developers. The discovery protocol uses Simple Service Discovery Protocol (SSDP). RTCOA makes apps available for IOS and Android.