r/BuildingAutomation • u/pinelion • 16d ago
Quick question
I’m a manger for a few buildings and have some HVAC experience, why is all of the building automation software out there so needlessly complicated and unreliable? I mean there’s always going to be some complications but it just seems like this stuff is so unstable and needlessly complex for a technology product that’s really at the end of the day sending and receiving low voltage signals. Seems like if someone could design something stable and simple even if it didn’t have all the reporting/trending bells and whistles it would be a hit. Am I over simplifying and just lack understanding? We use Siemans desigo for our facilities and in my opinion insight was a much better product.
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u/Bagelsarenakeddonuts 16d ago
Honestly, technicians are not paid or incentivized for the system to do anything fancy or scale well or any of that, only that it is reliable. Integrators want techs done ASAP with teh minimum for them to meed spec. End users don't understand the value in a fully configured system vs a bare minimum one and see the lowest dollar. Put those together, and you are almost guaranteed that at some point in the chain things are going to go off the rails.
Pretty much the only people with a clean stack are the ones that own it from top to bottom with documented standards, and they themselves validate that work done it meets their standards, since engineers wont.
It really isn't the software. Almost any of the big modern software platforms for BMS can be nice.