This week’s Smart City roundup feature a system that lets employees control office temperature, a way for small business owners to save on their electric bill, and a district-wide WiFi project to connect more people.

Comfy office

If you work in an office with a central temperature control, you’ve probably experienced rigidly cold temperatures in the summer, or uncomfortably hot temperatures when it’s snowing outside.

Comfy aims to put temperature control at the hands of employees, all while consuming less energy.  Comfy is a piece of hardware that plugs into an existing Building Management System. With the use of a web or mobile app, employees can change the temperature .  Comfy provides instant streams of warm or cool air to a person’s current location, and also uses machine learning in the background to predict what temperature each employee likes, as well as when a particular area is empty, further saving energy resources.

“If you look at a typical office building, you’ll probably find 40-50 percent empty space at any time,”  Lindsay Baker, vice president of research for Building Robotics, the Oakland-based startup making the new app, says. “Maybe someone’s in a meeting and their office is empty, or a conference room isn’t being used, or a lobby space is empty. By conditioning those spaces less, we’re saving an enormous amount of energy.”

Leviton’s Dollars & Sensors

Leviton, a provider of lighting management solutions for residential, commercial and industrial buildings, introduced Dollars & Sensors (D&S) Online Energy Audit Tool for lighting retrofit applications.

Dollars & Sensors is a sales tool to simplify energy audits for business owners.  D&S is meant for distributors, contractors and lighting professionals to deliver a cost-effective solution to customers faster by removing the guesswork in conducting energy audits and generating return on investment reports and analyses by providing a customizable bill of material for each project.

It allows professionals to use a smart device to effectively conduct a sensor energy audit as they walk through a space with key decision makers.  It features a simple interface that intuitively guide users to easily input audit information such as room size, existing lights and energy saving Leviton sensor and LevNet RF Energy Harvesting Wireless products, with the use of a smart device.

D&S is also compatible with the Leviton Light Logger tool, which monitors and logs changes in the lighting and occupancy in a space to forecast energy and cost savings as well as validate energy savings after installation.

SFUSD reinforces WiFi connectivity

The San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD), home to some 9,000 staff and 56,000 students (making it the seventh largest school district in California), is on a mission to connect more people. The district has standardized Ruckus ZoneFlex Smart WiFi products to address the district’s  need for pervasive and reliable wireless performance.

This initiative is part of SFUSD’s Vision 2025, which explores the areas that will greatly impact San Francisco in the coming years.  One of the areas Vision 2025 focuses on is technology, specifically new practices and new technologies that create a rich web that connects students to teachers, parents to classrooms, teachers to teachers, the District to the city and beyond.  In order to do this, SFUSD decided it was time it replaced its legacy WiFi network, which is based on older, conventional WiFi technology with Ruckus Wireless Inc.’s infrastructure.

“Mobile device proliferation and the push toward digital curriculum is driving schools to redesign their wireless infrastructure to meet new capacity and connectivity demands created by the BYOD phenomenon,” said Erik Heinrich, director of Technology Infrastructure for SFUSD.

The district-wide WiFi infrastructure upgrade includes over 1,500 Ruckus ZoneFlex indoor and outdoor Smart WiFi dual-band access points (APs), and Ruckus ZoneDirector 5000 WLAN controllers, which are deployed in a fully redundant configuration and provide simplified management, administration and visibility for the entire Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi network.

feature image via Comfy