Payoffs of Haystack Tagging: Relationships and Summaries

Tagging and data modeling have numerous benefits in the Buildings industry. In a recent blog, we discussed the challenges in the industry that are being solved by Project Haystack. Now, we will look at some practical examples of how tagging and data modeling is being used by the Haystack community in a variety of applications and use cases in a series of seven blogs (the seven payoffs). This blog highlights the payoffs of relationships and summaries.

Tags that reflect relationships are useful for showing how devices interrelate as part of a larger system. Relationship, or reference tags can also represent dependencies of equipment to floors, floors to buildings, buildings to enterprise, etc. Additional relationships can be represented with reference tags to help define systems:

- Air systems: AHUs to VAVs
- Water systems - hot water coils to boiler
- Electrical systems - sub meters to main meters

For example, reference tags can be used to build the hierarchical relationships of all the VAV’s in a particular air handler system. This makes it possible to call up equipment summaries. These summaries can be viewed from multiple perspectives such as all the VAVs on a floor or even the VAVs on an entire site. Anomalies are particularly easy to spot when they are presented in the context of other similar devices.

To read more about all of the payoffs, click here and download the complete whitepaper. To watch how to implement tagging using great software like FIN, check out the video below.