Building Automation – An architect’s heaven

Buildings you can talk to

Every two years, exhibitors push all the right buttons for architects, interior designers, and planners, at the Light+Building Fair in Frankfurt, where they showcase the latest innovations in lighting, electrical engineering, and house and building automation. This year was no exception!

With over 200 thousand visitors, the exhibition is the world’s biggest trade fair for lighting and building-services and presents technological solutions that help cut energy consumption while at the same time providing ever increasing levels of comfort.

ABB is one of the leaders in this field and their vision of future homes and buildings did not disappoint. They unveiled for the first time many new pioneering innovations that add even greater control and comfort to an already dazzling array of smart home and intelligent building products.

While on the 1,400 square meter ABB stand, I caught up with Benjamin Ohm, ABB’s European Sales Manager for Building Automation and he gave me a rundown of what ABB has to offer.

First up was ABB free@home wireless – the next generation smart home solution that is easy to install and operate, transforming your home into a building you can talk to, but with the additional breakthrough that it is now easy to retrofit to older properties, literally opening the door to a whole new range of customers.

Next, Benjamin showed me some exciting test systems for the future. He demonstrated the gesture commands for CongniPoint from PointGrab and handed control to me. Opening my hand switched on the lights, lowering my hand dimmed them, and closing my hand turned them off – incredible!

CongniPoint also detects the number of occupants in a room and their location, so that conditions, such as lighting and temperature, can be adjusted to suit.

Next up was a free@home solar concept for intelligent energy usage. Who said you couldn’t do more with less? With ABB’s residential energy storage system REACT (Renewable Energy Accumulator and Conversion Technology) you can store excess energy produced by your PV and use it when you need it.

You leave home for work and your washing machine is loaded ready to go. Later that day, when the sun is shining, power is generated and stored. When there’s enough power to run the load, the machine switches on and your washing is done – now that’s what I call clean living!

To read more about the event and the other new releases I haven’t highlighted here – click through to ABB at Light and Building 2016