ANSI/ASHRAE Standard 135-2012 BACnet allows building equipment and systems manufactured by different companies to work together.

This new standard is being published ahead of schedule due to wide-reaching changes in alarming functionality made by addendum af to Standard 135-2010. This edition of the standard also includes recently adopted changes for the light industry.

Addendum af provides significant improvements to the alarm handling in BACnet including, improved fault handling, temporary alarm recipient subscriptions, improvements in scalability of alarm distribution, and simplifications in alarm distribution to support less complex products, according to Carl Neilson, chair of the Standard 135 committee.

“For building owners/integrators these changes allow improvements in interoperability between lighting control products and other building automation systems,” he said. “Hopefully, this facilitates more deployment and integration of smart lighting controls, such as lights that turn on/off when occupants enter/leave rooms; lights that come on based on the same schedules as climate control; and opportunities to reduce lighting based on energy usage during demand/response events. With the changes in alarming, we also hope to see alarming support in smaller devices, which should provide more alarm and fault detection with a lower engineering cost.”

The cost of ANSI/ASHRAE Standard 135-2012, BACnet-A Data Communication Protocol for Building Automation and Control Networks, is $140 for ASHRAE members, $170 for non-members. For more information, visit www.ashrae.org.

Publication date: 4/8/2013