We Know These Buildings Because We Work in Them Every Day
A stadium, arena or convention center spends most of its hours empty between events, but the plug load inside it (concessions, suites, offices and concourses) is often left running on the same schedule as event day. The bigger the venue, the bigger the gap between occupied and unoccupied hours, and the bigger the opportunity.
The Spaces, and What BERT Does in Each
Concessions & Food-Service SupportNon-Food-Safety Equipment Only
Displays, POS, beverage and coffee equipment, scheduled to the event calendar, not a fixed daily pattern.
Luxury Suites & Club Areas
TVs, refrigerators and other suite equipment, repeated in every suite and often left on between events.
Soldier Field: 564 Smart Plugs. Facilities staff now switch every luxury suite's TVs and refrigerators from one office instead of visiting 133 suites before and after every event; remote control of the suites saves $24,000 a year in labor costs.
Administrative & Box Offices
The same workstation and display equipment as any office space, running on the venue's own staff schedule rather than the event calendar.
Public Concourses & Common Areas
Phone and device charging stations and concourse displays, used only during event hours and otherwise idle.
Manual Master Control: Authorized staff can also switch every BERT-controlled device on at once ahead of an event, or off at once when the venue closes for the night.
The Challenges We Hear: Some Familiar to Every Facility, Some Specific to Venues
Common to Most Facilities We Work With
- Tight operating budgets, where every dollar saved matters between events. 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.
- 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 venues, long procurement and red tape in others (a municipally owned venue vs. a privately held one). 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 venues, 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.
More Specific to Venues
- An event calendar, not a weekly calendar. A venue's busy season might be a handful of event days a month with everything else empty, so a fixed daily or weekly schedule doesn't fit. BERT's schedule matches your actual event calendar instead.
- A small facilities team covering a very large building. Remote, one-place control saves the walk from space to space. The Soldier Field example above shows how.
- Sharp swings in occupancy within the same day. A venue can go from empty to full capacity and back in a matter of hours around a single event.
What's Typically Controlled
Non-food-safety concession equipment (displays, POS, beverage and coffee equipment), office workstations and displays, phone and device charging stations, water coolers, window AC and PTAC units where applicable, and refrigerators holding non-perishable products, or empty ones. Never life-safety, emergency or security systems, servers and network equipment, or anything that must stay on.
Your savings depend on how many devices we control, what they are, and when your building is empty.
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.