Office Building Buzz Words - Terms You Should Know (Part 1)

If you currently invest or are considering investing in office buildings, here are a couple office buzz words you should familiarize yourself with. Smart Buildings A smart building isn’t necessarily very smart. During the seventies, heat, ventilation, and air-conditioning were automated HVAC systems. These first dedicated computers would turn the heat or the air-conditioning on in the morning, turn it off at night, and knew the difference between a weekday and a Saturday, Sunday, or holiday. Everyone began calling this is a smart building because it saved you a lot of money on air-conditioning. Later, those air-conditioning computers became really smart. They would allow you to adjust your thermostat to a controlled degree. For instance, if you tried to set the thermostat at 58 degrees, the overriding computer would only go down to 70 degrees— that was the set point. At that point, it would turn the air conditioner off. If the temperature rose higher than 73 degrees, it would start the air-conditioner. Therefore, tenants began to have less and less control over their office environment. However, it had been a big waste of energy when different tenants controlled their own space. You might have had five thermostats in an office full of people who each thought that they knew best, what the temperature ought to be. Smart buildings today do so much more because in order to compete they must build in high-tech communications systems. Buildings are constructed with fiber optics to every floor with a T-1 line for telephone calls and high-speed internet. Entrenched Slabs Another smart building concept and office building buzz word is one that is just now starting to happen, over the past four or five years. Every four feet some sort of trench is cut in the slab with a metal plate over it. Inside this nine-inch wide and three-inch deep trench is all the conduits and plumbing for the building. You don’t have to actually cut through the slab, but you go underneath with your pipe and then back up. These trenches are everywhere—some of them are just trenches, while others are voids in the slab. There are no openings unless there’s an intersection. The nine-inch square metal plate is at each intersection. This means that if you have the system underneath you, inside your floor, and you wanted to change some plumbing requirement, you can get it within four feet of any plumbing you want. Of course, electric and safety codes apply to all these devices. It’s the same way with electricity and telephones. Therefore, no matter what innovations and communications or electrical transmissions are required, the builders can lay a whole new system in the floor without destroying any existing materials.  Now that’s a smart building concept! Stay tuned for upcoming articles with more "Office Building Buzz Words" you'll want to know.

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