Home / Industries / Government & Public Facilities
Industries · Government & Public Facilities
Government & Public Facilities
We Know These Buildings Because We Work in Them Every Day
A city, county or state government isn't one building. It's administrative offices, libraries, community centers and community health centers, each open to the public on its own schedule and each carrying its own mix of equipment nobody's gotten around to scheduling.
The Spaces, and What BERT Does in Each
Administrative Offices & Service Counters
Workstations, displays and shared-office equipment keep public-facing hours on paper but, in practice, often don't.
Asset Management: Customers also use BERT's device-level usage data to decide which equipment to retire, replace or relocate, based on what's actually being used rather than guesswork.
Libraries
Shared workstations, displays and equipment sit idle well outside public hours, including evenings and days the branch is closed.
Community Centers
Shared-space equipment with the least predictable schedule of any space here: open for public programs some hours, empty the rest.
Community Health CentersOffice-Type Spaces Only
Offices, break rooms and waiting areas; never clinical or medical equipment.
Public Meeting Spaces
AV and display equipment is used for a handful of hours a month and often left running the rest of the time.
Manual Master Control: Authorized users can also switch every BERT-controlled device on at once (for a special event or a testing pass) or off at once (for a snow day or an extended closure).
Parks and Recreation Facilities
Equipment with the most seasonal schedule of any space here. Some buildings and fields run only part of the year, and the equipment inside them usually doesn't know that.
Public Safety Administrative OfficesNon-operational spaces only: offices, records and training rooms; never equipment tied to dispatch, life-safety or emergency response
The same office-type equipment as any administrative space, in a building that often runs different hours than the rest of a government campus.
The Challenges We Hear: Some Familiar to Every Facility, Some Specific to Public Buildings
Common to Most Facilities We Work With
- Tight budgets, where every dollar saved matters, and public accountability for how it's spent. Two ways to buy: own the system outright, or Smart Energy Suite, which gets BERT installed with little or no upfront capital.
- An aging BAS, or none at all. BERT runs standalone by design, so it isn't waiting on a BAS to reach plug loads a BAS usually doesn't reach.
- More plug loads every year, with no schedules planned for them.
- Buildings used only part of the week since COVID, with hours and programming that don't match a single building-wide schedule.
- Flexible staff schedules. Every controller has its own override, available to anyone on site outside the schedule — press and hold until the light changes and you hear a click.
- Deferred-maintenance backlogs competing for the same capital. BERT doesn't fix deferred maintenance. It's a comparatively low-capital measure that doesn't have to compete with larger infrastructure projects for budget, and Smart Energy Suite gets it installed with little or no upfront capital.
- Fast capital approval in some agencies, long procurement and red tape in others. Both an outright purchase and Smart Energy Suite fit; for a formal bid or spec process, the Core Guide Specification and standard SOW support it.
- A large IT department in some agencies, third-party IT on call in others. Either way, BERT's footprint is light: an outbound-only connection on your own Wi-Fi network, with no BAS changes required to run standalone.
- Aging facilities, often still cooled room by room. Central HVAC works well in some buildings; older ones often rely on PTAC or window AC units instead, which is exactly the kind of equipment BERT controls.
Anomaly Spotting: Customers tell us they use device-level comparisons in BERTBrain's reports to spot equipment problems early. One unit drawing far more power than a similar one nearby has pointed them to clogged filters, frozen units and other mechanical or electrical faults.
More Specific to Public Buildings
- Many separate departments and buildings, one budget. A library, a community center and an administrative building may report to entirely different managers but draw from the same public budget: a multi-site, multi-decision-maker footprint that BERT's portfolio approach is built for.
- Public hours are fixed and published, but usage inside them isn't. A library's open hours are set well in advance, but which rooms and equipment actually get used in those hours still varies. The schedule a public building publishes isn't the same as the schedule its equipment actually needs.
- Seasonal buildings and fields. Parks and Recreation Facilities often run on a season, not a week — fully staffed for months, then largely closed, with an off-season the equipment inside them rarely follows.
Public-Sector Deployments
BERT is installed in public school districts, including Jersey City Public Schools, one of BERT's largest deployments (see the Education page), and Newark Public Schools.
Your savings depend on how many devices we control, what they are, and when your building is empty.
What's Typically Controlled
Workstations and displays in administrative offices, break-room equipment, public-area water coolers and vending machines, window AC and PTAC units where applicable, shared-space equipment in libraries and community centers, and seasonal equipment in parks and recreation facilities. Never life-safety, emergency or security systems, servers and network equipment, or anything that must stay on, including anything tied to dispatch or emergency response at public safety buildings.
How It Fits Your Project
BERT works standalone or alongside an existing building automation system through BERT Connect (BACnet/IP) when your project includes it.