The glass and steel structure comprises 252,000 square feet of occupied space with many unique exterior and interior architectural features. Situated on The Mountain in Framingham, MA, Bose's headquarters offers its 800 occupants the ultimate in comfort.

The importance of details is evident in the company's quest for both employee comfort and energy efficiency. To complement the facility's unique architecture, Bose sought an innovative HVAC and building control system. Bose selected BCM Controls to provide an Andover Controls Infinity Building Automation System (BAS) to meet the special HVAC and lighting needs typical of a variable occupancy structure. Subsequently, Bose upgraded their original Infinity system to Continuum and gained full BACnet capabilities. Backwards compatible to Infinity, the Continuum system offers a familiar Windows Explorer-like interface, user defined schedules, enhanced alarming features, extended logs and an open ODBC-compliant SQL database.

Six of the eight air handling units (AHU) in the building are Variable Air Volume, serving almost 500 VAV boxes that maximize energy savings without sacrificing indoor air quality. Maintaining accurate minimum outside air ventilation is critical so outside air intake was measured directly with electronic air flow stations at each air handler (AHU). An unusual feature of the two largest AHU's (100,000 cfm each) is that there are 8 outdoor air intake ducts with independent dampers and electronic airflow stations for each system. Control of the 8 dampers is sequenced to maintain a high outside air velocity during all conditions, which minimizes a major weakness of outside airflow monitoring for VAV fan systems – inaccuracy at low air velocity.

BCM implemented two interesting strategies to enhance the typical energy management functions of a VAV control system. First, each room with its own VAV box is equipped with an occupancy sensor. When the room is unoccupied, the lights turn off and the VAV box minimum and maximum cfm setpoints for the room are reduced to 25% of their occupied settings, reducing the load on the central air handling unit. Second, for areas where one VAV box serves multiple rooms, the VAV box minimum cfm setpoint was designed based on 15% of the total ventilation being outside air. If the AHU use of outside air increases as during the economizer mode, the VAV box minimum cfm setpoint is proportionately decreased since there is more than adequate fresh air. As a result, each zone is constantly supplied with the appropriate amount of outside air and the air handler is operating as efficiently as possible.

The BAS controls 3,000 HVAC and lighting points within the 6-story facility with 550 Andover Infinity controllers. The controllers connect to an Ethernet TCP/IP backbone in the building with a LAN file server, which provides Bose the opportunity for virtually unlimited controller and workstation expansion. BCM's engineers collaborated with Bose's IT department to connect the Andover BAS to the existing Bose Ethernet network, providing a convenient, cost-effective and more reliable alternative to cable or telephone links to remote sites.

Bose required the flexibility and versatility typical of BCM: cost-effective, user-friendly control applications engineered to meet the unique requirements of each customer.

Many thanks to Bose Corporation for a successful working relationship.