Pilkington, St. Helens 

With around 27,000 permanent employees, NSG have principal operations in over 100 countries around the world and sales in excess of £4 Billion. The company has three main areas of business, architectural glass, automotive glass and technical glass. Synetica installed wireless metering and environmental sensors at the Pilkington Data Centre at their UK headquarters in St. Helens. The data is securely transmitted to Synetica’s enVision IoT platform where the data can be analysed and reported.

Within months of the initial install, a system generated alarm alerted the data centre staff to a problem with the cooling system. During a routine chiller service visit the data centre operating set point was reset from the required 23°C to 18.5°C, which resulted in an instantaneous increase in energy consumption of 35% and degraded the Power usage effectiveness (PUE) from 1.4 to 1.55. The enVision alert allowed staff to quickly identify and rectify the issue before it resulted in increased operating costs.

Pilkington glass is used in many iconic buildings around the world and one of the most striking is The Shard in London, the building is made up of eight glass shards which define the shape of the tower.

DataStream energy loggers and enLink wireless monitoring are installed at numerous data centres globally, helping them keep track and allocate energy consumption for individual clients and to manage the critical data centre environment.

The Shard is covered in 11,000 panes of Pilkington glass, which when laid out flat would cover 8 football pitches. All 11,000 panes are different, not one is identical to another. Pilkington Optiwhite™ low iron glass has been used to glaze the building combined with a solar control coating, making the facade highly energy efficient, therefore helping to reduce the running costs of the building. Synetica’s enLink environmental sensors are installed at The Shard as a showcase for Mitie Group PLC’s “Connected Workspace”. In the Connected Workspace, smart maintenance services will use prediction and remote analysis to replace reactive and planned activities.

New technologies and data analytics will control the office environment in a way that combines comfort, safety and wellbeing with energy efficiency and sustainability. Mitie use sensors and machine learning algorithms to increase the security of employees, and to provide an end-to-end, real-time view of a client’s properties.