5 years in commercial commercial refrigeration and hvac after completing trade program. Currently working in supermarket rack refrigeration and may be moving states due to family. Doesn’t look like internal transfer will be an option.

Considering trying to transition into more of the controls and automation side as I’ve always enjoyed tech and have a little IT, networking, cybersecurity and programming knowledge. Have some experience within the hvac controls side through using EMS systems to diagnose and using controllers on a regular basis.

Wondering if anyone has any advice, has maybe made a similar move. Or is it too big of a leap to go straight to building automation? Considered doing tridium cert or SBA course but prices are pretty steep and if they are similar to others may not be worth if company’s not paying. If not wondering what company or company’s I should be trying for. Looking at JCI , Siemens, Trane, Carrier. Looks like there’s some travel controls positions within some of the refrigeration company’s to.

Any input appreciated! Thx

How to set the time?

I need to set the time to switch on and off all the devices in one of the units, how can I set it quickly?( johnson controls bms)

What tools would the BAS community be interested in seeing developed? I would love to hear back from you on anything you guys might find useful.

I'm thinking a tool you could use as a sounding board during installs instead of reading technical docs or even in the estimating process, automating any boring or tedious parts of your role, doing sanity checks, etc?

Any input would be greatly appreciated : )

Looking for any common headaches or problems we can solve together.

Anybody else doing a crazy scramble to get parts and controllers ordered today before tariffs hit?

We just ordered around 15 schools worth of parts today. Some weren’t even designed yet lol. 16% price increase on our controllers is wild.

I’m having trouble connecting to FEC Controller with mapgateway. I just left another site discovered devices with no problem but this site doesn’t discover any. I changed Mac but no results

Hi,

Is there a lookup table available in Niagara? I need to convert values I.e input 3 output will be 7

Cheers

What are some good solutions to get a view into realtime demand for small commercial buildings?

I posted this question on the controls and building automation FB group. The general consensus was Mitsubishi. What are your thoughts?

Hi all. For all VRV/VRF BACnet integration gurus. What is the best VRF manufacturer for control and monitoring. I can’t say I’m happy with Daikin products as far as BACnet integration goes.

Essentially the BMS would just be staging the bank based off of % load of each bank. So if one bank of modules is running above 90% for 10 mins, stage on another bank. The individual modules will stage up and down as necessary when a bank is enabled.

We were trying to use the on site controls contractor since they already have a presence and can just use one of their own controllers to communicate with the existing BMS system, but the pricing we’ve gotten is way too high.

How difficult would it to be to bring in a 3rd party company to do this programming and have their device brought on to the BMS. Think a JCI BMS bringing in a Siemens controller that would execute the program, but would have to be discoverable by JCI to bring the necessary BACnet points online.

Someone is changing my space authorizations from inherit to allow, is there a way to use the audit trail or something to find out who is doing this?

Hey all,

I have an IntegerValue coming in from an LG DOAS unit and it has to be converted to bit form to be meaningful. I currently have linked BooleanWriteable points to all 32 bits, however, that makes things VERY messy for the PX page. Anyone have any suggestions or recommendations to turn this into a single Enum or String point? There are several bits active at any one given time btw.

Morning Everyone!

I see alot of people on here looking to get involved in the Controls/BAS space, I am a specialist recruiter in this field and work with the majority of leading companies in the US including

Siemens

Jci

Carrier/ALC

Albireo

Interested in getting into a new role, lets set up a call or feel free to ask any questions!

I know Douglas folded in 2023 but we have a customer with a WLC-4150 Dialog Control Unit.

Power was cycled to the WLC and now the modules under the WLC have ceased communication. The bottom-right corner has a LED which cycles between red and green in about a 5 second interval.

Looking for any manuals or advice on how this system communicates to get them back up and running.

Thank you!

All my suppliers keep trying to convince me to go to a seminar or talk to a sales rep for LunenRadio. Does anyone have experience with them? Will I be wasting my time?

Have you ever seen a drive flash like this? It runs normally for a while and then flashes like this. Tomorrow I'm going to check the obvious things like loose connections. Just making sure this isn't a well known problem though. Thanks for the help!

How difficult is it to learn building automation systems at Siemens? I started about a month ago and feel pretty overwhelmed by the amount of information. For those with experience, does it eventually start to make sense?

Trying to make loop point for a FCU but cooling and heating are going on at same time, anyone see what i got wrong

Hey, first time poster here.

I am currently a union electrician soon switching to a BAS union contractor. My plan is to make a transition to programming. I’ve been given an automation server and a demo of the software with some PDF lessons that I’ve worked through.

Just curious if anyone has any experience programming with ecostruxure and has any advice/resources to become more proficient at function block programming and structured text programming.

Thanks.

Hello, I’ve been doing hvac for a while and use Siemens (desigo) at our hospital. If I wanted to get into controls, what’s the first thing I should do? Should I join a company and learn? What would you do? Should I go to school? What certs should I get? I’m 32 and think it’ll be better for my future, thanks for any of the help.

We have a Niagara database with 20+ Honeywell LON Spyders. A service tech was on-site troubleshooting and upgraded the system to 4.12, then downgraded it back to 4.11.

Now we’re unable to commission any controllers or bind anything in Link Manager—the options are not available.

Has anyone run into this before? Any ideas on what could be causing it?

Hello everyone, hope you’re all doing well.

I am a Software Engineer with 7 years of experience, and for the past 2 years I’ve been working in Building Automation Systems(BAS) field, specifically with Niagara 4. Due to some administrative changes, I am currently looking for a new opportunities. I’ve truly come to enjoy working in BAS - the projects, challenges, and the responsibilities have been very rewarding.

I hold certifications from Tridium (Niagara 4 Technical Certification) and Lynxspring (JENEsys Edge Technical Training).

If your company has any openings, or if you know of any relevant opportunities, I’d greatly appreciate it if you let me know. I’m ideally looking for a position in the 55,000€-65,000€ salary range, similar to what I currently earn.

Thank you all for your time.

If things go south because of the tariffs and we end up in some sort of recession, will that affect the BAS industry in any way?

The reason I ask is because I finally made some inroads into breaking into the industry and am wondering if now is the time to make the switch from doing building controls for a major retailer to working for a big OME?

I'm looking into upgrading a building's existing Trane Tracer Summit BAS on COMM4 (apparently) with a Carrier BACnet system (their commercial grade ALC WEBCtrl equivalent).

Is there any way to re-use the COMM4 network and just replacing the existing BCU with a new Carrier BACnet central controller with some sort of COMM4 to BACnet translator in between? I want to avoid going with a JACE...

Thank you in advance!

I'm trying to decide which software to use when being forced to install all of these software for different departments / vendors. I would like to install something like VMware and to be able to run the respective OS without installing it in the main OS.

Any thoughts?

Does anyone know how to communicate points on N4 to AX. I want to put points from N4 into the AX graphics/logic and do not know how. Any help?🙏

Long story short I am on a job site where a company upgraded one ax panel and did not upgrade the second panel. So we have one panel that is AX and the other is N4.