THE CHALLENGE
The building owner was locked into a proprietary BAS from a single vendor who charged $185 per hour for even basic schedule changes, with a typical service call costing $800 to $1,200. The system used a closed protocol that prevented competitive bidding for maintenance or expansion, and the original installer had no local presence, resulting in 48- to 72-hour response times for urgent issues. Three different generations of controllers from the same manufacturer were installed across the building, and two of the three models had been discontinued with no replacement parts available.
OUR SOLUTION
Vertex installed BACnet and Modbus gateways on all existing controllers to bring them under a new Niagara N4 supervisor, giving the owner immediate visibility and scheduling control without replacing any hardware on day one. Over the following four months, controllers were replaced floor-by-floor during off-hours with no disruption to building occupants, starting with the two discontinued models. Equipment from Trane, Carrier, and Daikin was unified onto a single open BACnet platform with standardized graphics and centralized alarm management, eliminating the single-vendor dependency entirely.
SCOPE OF WORK
“We were paying a fortune just to change a time schedule, and waiting days for someone to show up. Vertex gave us an open system where we can get competitive bids and actually manage the building ourselves. It completely changed our operating budget.”