Steve Rogerson visited this month’s Smart Buildings Show in London

I have a confession to make. Despite writing about this technology all the time, I do not live in a smart home. In fact, I would go as far as saying my home is pretty stupid.

Nothing is automatic. If I want it hotter or cooler, I have to adjust the heating manually. The only thing that responds to my voice is my phone; I never use that feature except accidentally. I don’t even have a smart meter, though I have tried to get one, but that’s a story for another day.

I thus felt a little bit of a fraud as I walked round this month’s Smart Buildings Show in London and tried to talk intelligently with people about some quite amazing technologies that I have never used nor am I likely to in the foreseeable future. That said, if someone has one of those autonomous vacuum cleaners that they want to try out in a cluttered and challenging environment, I am more than happy to volunteer as a tester.

Anyway, back to the show where I went to a talk by Brett Spindler, a senior director at Schneider Electric, who started by saying technology does not really do anything. That nearly made me spill my coffee, but he went onto say the question was not whether you had a technology-enabled building but whether you did anything intelligent with it.

He said there were four pillars of an intelligent building – sustainable, resilient, efficient and people centric.

The whole sustainability thing was the hot topic of the show. Many in the smart building industry have realised that the climate change problems have become a good hook to interest people in splashing out on smart building technology. Everyone wants to say they are going green and are aiming for carbon neutrality by whatever date they have plucked out of the air.

But Spindler warned they have to look at a lot more than turning off the lights.

“You need to think about how to reduce the requirement to consume energy and not just put in more solar panels,” he said. “You have to think about everything from a pandemic to climate change.”

Overall, the big question he said was knowing what you wanted to do. It is alright collecting data but it is better to decide what you want to achieve before deciding what you want to connect. And then do it. And that, apparently, is still a problem. There are people who work out exactly what they want to do, and then sit on their hands not doing it.

In a way, I suppose that is understandable. We have all been there; getting started is difficult, especially when there are often more pressing things from a business or personal aspect. However, as Spindler pointed out: “It is not knowing what needs to be done that improves things, it is actually doing it.”

And that does not mean turning the heating down. You may save yourself a few dollars on your fuel bill, but if all your employees are shivering in a corner, then you are going to be worse off.

As an aside, he talked about the possibility of making a digital twin of an entire country. That would be awesome, or “terrifying” as he described the task. But, again, if you don’t start to think and plan that, you will never get there.

One current trend noticed by Roger Woodward, who runs his own consultancy, is that building owners are themselves getting smarter.

“They know their stuff and are starting to specify what goes on,” he said.

And they need to. Real-estate guys hoping to rent out a building are finding that potential occupants are demanding smart technology and so the building owner has to find out about what is needed and what is available and how much it costs, and so on. And many are.

So, I enjoyed the show. I enjoyed looking at the latest ways to make our buildings smarter. And I am sure I will enjoy some of these technologies when I visit other buildings and hotels. But at home, I like my clutter. Oh, and my smart TV; I forgot about that.