Made Practical
59%
of building energy costs are consumed by lighting
Leverage. Made Practical.
Bank of New Zealand
The Challenge
It goes without saying that you will never make money with a security system as it is not an investment that provides a return. So it makes sense that you want to leverage as many benefits as possible from the system to reduce your running costs.
A survey by the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) on energy within the retail and service industry, found that lighting makes up for a staggering 59% of energy costs, with HVAC accounting for another 25%.
Energy efficiency is one of the key factors in BNZ’s strategy for addressing climate change, so implementing an integrated solution that could reduce energy consumption and operating costs as well as providing security and access control from one centrally managed system was in keeping with their corporate philosophy.
The Solution
Protege GX has certainly paid off for BNZ. It provides a sophisticated yet simple, single-point solution that balances energy efficiency while ensuring the right levels of lighting and ventilation for the comfort of their staff and customers.
Schedules help to actively manage energy use and reduce costs by ensuring lighting, hot water and air conditioning switches on and off dependent on store opening hours.
Lighting is configured to come on progressively as staff arrive and turn off as they leave. When the cleaners arrive, lighting adjusts to full power to ensure good visibility. In the event of an alarm being activated, lighting comes on automatically providing the added benefit of better security camera footage outside hours when lights would otherwise be off.
As well as helping to significantly reduce energy costs, the system provides much greater visibility of what is happening, allowing savings in other areas. Operators can see and monitor events in real time, reducing the number of patrols that are called out in response to false alarms.
Switching to IP monitoring has resulted in considerable savings by removing the line rental and usage charges associated with analog phone lines, and allows BNZ to leverage off the in-house security monitoring capability of their parent company, the National Australia Bank.
The upgrade to Protege GX was able to take place over an extended period without interrupting service to existing sites. In addition, the existing hardware was compatible only requiring a firmware upgrade to work with the new system.
The client server architecture and high performance SQL Server database engine make Protege GX a truly robust and scalable system. This is crucial for an organization of BNZ’s size, with 180 branches and 580 controllers generating more than 2.7 million events a week.
Our systems have a range of features that allow you to reduce your energy consumption and overall running costs.
