Introduction
Tirna Partners is a Canadian consulting company and a Sensative partner focusing on accelerating companies’ growth. The company consists of several C-level executives, some with long experience working with telecom and IoT before entering Tirna Partners. The company is working closely with integration service companies such as Canadian Viridian Automation to provide real estate owners and large corporations with IoT technology to increase ROI, provide safety, reach sustainability goals, and more.
Below you find a summary of the case, click here to skip it and go directly to the video.
Why they chose Sensative’s products
Tirna Partners’ Brian Barry explains how both the company and their integration partners researched the market. They all concluded that Sensative offers unique products that fit their services well.
Strips
Form factor
With its unique ultra-thin (3mm) design, Sensative Strips are an ideal choice when placing sensors in visible or narrow areas of a building. Due to the slim design and their neutral coloring in white, the aesthetics of a building will not have to suffer from implementing these sensors.
Battery life
Barry highlights the necessity of long and reliable battery life when dealing with wireless IoT sensors. As Sensative Strips has an expected battery life of at least 10 years (15-20 years a possibility depending on use case), it was the ideal choice for implementing sensors in hard-to-reach areas of large buildings.
The Yggio Platform
Data ownership
With Yggio, customers are free to control their data and use it however they wish. Data ownership is often a deal-breaker in many cases as many customers deal with sensitive data, especially when it comes to municipal customers or utility companies. One customer might want to use a cloud service, while another might want to store their data in a local system.
We have based the Yggio platform on the cybersecurity concept “Zero Trust” (“never trust, always verify”), which means that no actions or access to any devices or data can happen without proper authorization so that no matter what business a customer is in, the data is always fully protected.
Broad ability for system integration
Barry shares his experience from discussing needs with large corporations and municipalities in North America – They have grown tired of vertical, siloed solutions. The horizontal Yggio platform, with its open standards and API, can be integrated with any major applications for these to feed data into Yggio. Likewise, Yggio can collect data and send this to the customers’ own management system.
This openness means that Tirna Partners can give customers a clear increase in their ROI from a single use case.
Installing the Yggio system also opens up to many other use cases to further increase their ROI without further investing in new systems. Not only can the customer avoid investing in additional systems, but they can also start to migrate their current operations to Yggio so that they can save on expensive siloed systems that they operate today.
Barry illuminates the issue of data ownership when discussing how Google invested substantial sums in Toronto, Canada, to digitize the whole city. After lengthy discussions, the entire project fell apart as the city and Google could not find a solution where the city and citizens controlled their data without Google’s exploitation and subsequent integrity problems.
The Sensative Team
Technical experts
Barry shares the company’s satisfaction with Sensative’s expertise in the market and products.
With Sensative’s remote sensors having an extensive battery life and communicating on the LoRaWAN radio communication protocol, the company felt that Sensative is on top of the market and supply the best and most cost-efficient technology.
Tirna Partners has also seen this when in customer discussions; the customer in question can bring in their experts to have extensive technical discussions with Sensative staff.
Markets and use cases
Tirna Partners focus on large-scale commercial customers such as major real estate owners, large corporations, and municipalities for their services. To these customers, the company offers IoT technology for several use cases, for the moment focusing on water leak prevention technology.
Challenges in North America
As Barry points out with a smile, one might not think so, but North America has quite a high number of old buildings that pose many challenges to real estate owners. In particular, the issue is water leakage and the subsequent damage.
Insurance issues
Barry mentions that some North American buildings have to face insurance companies not willing to insure the owners or give them soaring premiums due to the higher risk of buildings facing water damages. With some buildings having suffered from water damages annually and thus not having any sensible insurance alternatives, owners painfully require new solutions.
Complex building structures
Barry talks about how high-rise buildings in the Toronto area, one of Tirna Partners’ main customer areas, have challenging structures with several risers going through all floors. There might be one riser dealing with hot water in one area and another riser dealing with wastewater. This dividing of the in- and out-going feeder systems makes it extensively challenging to do any serious structural changes.
Water leak prevention
With a focus on water leak prevention consultation and installations, Tirna Partners have presented customers with solutions consisting of Sensative’s Strips MS +Drip water leak detection multi-sensors for LoRaWAN. The sensors are in turn running on Sensative’s DiMS (Data Infrastructure Management System) IoT platform Yggio.
Customer case
Barry highlights one of Tirna Partners’ key accounts, a blue-chip company in Canada. For this company, Tirna Partners installed Strips MS +Drip sensors and the Yggio platform in a 64-floor high-rise building (about 25 commercial floors and about 35 residential floors) together with their integration partners. As the customer has been delighted with the results, they are now moving on to their second project together.
Installations in older buildings
To solve the issues of water leaks in the old North American buildings previously mentioned, Tirna Partners has installed water leak detection technology from Sensative in conjunction with water leak prevention technology. The water leak prevention solutions consist of remotely controlled IoT cut-off valves. When a Sensative sensor detects a water leak, it can send this data to the Yggio platform, where scenarios are programmed to instruct the valve shutters to activate when any leakage is detected.
Gains
Whether a customer is the proprietary owner of an old or new building, installing these types of water leak solutions can not only decrease (or enable) insurance premiums but also raise the property value considerably. Tirna Partners estimate a 40% reduction of premiums by installing such technology.
Water metering
Why it is necessary
Old buildings and old ways of doing business have survived due to changes being challenging to realize in the buildings’ systems. Today, there are still many older rental properties in North America where residents pay a monthly fee for water, electricity, and other utilities, no matter how much resources they spend. It is a no-brainer that this can not be sustainable in modern times with resources becoming scarce and so more expensive.
Barry talks about how utility costs for residents might increase about 2-3% annually, based on residential contracts that might have been established 20-30 years ago but still not near paying for the cost of the resources for the building owner.
Challenges
A solution to this issue is to install individual water metering technology, which has become common in large parts of Europe, just as electricity metering technology.
The problem with these old large buildings is the mentioned separation of feeder systems, which are unfavorably placed and old and thus not very friendly to structural changes. The standard solution for water metering would be to cut up the pipes and install water meters in them, but this will endanger the buildings to further leakage opportunities, thus raising insurance premiums rather than lowering them.
New solutions
Tirna Partners is looking at an alternative – installing external IoT water metering devices that can be clamped on the pipes and provide data with a 5% accuracy without cutting any pipes. Such an installation would raise the real estate value without risking any issues with insurance premiums being raised. Further, if the customer uses an open IoT platform like Yggio to collect the data, they will also increase the real estate value.
By installing an open IoT platform, the customers will gain many opportunities to increase their ROI through other use cases without buying more expensive systems to realize these applications.
To learn more about Tirna Partners, visit their website @ tirnapartners.com.
Shop for products
Strips MS +Drip sensors can be found directly in our webshop.
For the customer who wants to learn about IoT and try out Sensative’s MS +Drip sensors together with the Yggio platform, we offer a “Starter Kit for Water Leak risk management” for monitoring water leaks, temperature, doors/windows, and more. A powerful starter kit that works excellent in any commercial buildings.
If you are interested in buying our solutions in this case or need help tailoring a solution for your specific needs, visit our webshop or contact our sales team to evaluate your possibilities and requirements. We are here to help.