Smart Command

Smart Command originated from dealing with urinal maintenance issues experienced in a commercial building six years ago, which required extensive checking of installations across the building. The urinals needed to be removed and tested to measure the delivered flush volume. This was time consuming, unpleasant work and required each bathroom to be closed from users while the work was conducted. During this project, we proceeded with the customer brief to find a better way to obtain diagnostic feedback from individual urinal installations without having to remove them from the wall to measure the flush volume to minimise customer disruption.

The development of a new urinal electronic controller was initially released with manual controls, LED indicators and diagnostics to check for problems. This solution was further developed to include Bluetooth connectivity with a Smartphone app. Expanding on the Bluetooth connectivity concept, the Smart Command solution was extended to include the concealed toilet suite, tapware, and shower along with the urinal as a comprehensive IoT intelligent bathroom Eco-System. The concept further evolved into a complete intelligent bathroom solution with products that have data connections that can be monitored and controlled via Bluetooth gateways using the Caroma Cloud and commercial BMS.

As all data is gathered at the individual fixture and reflects actual usage, better informed decisions can be made by a facility manager to optimise the building’s water usage, detect leaks, enable cleaning efficiencies by knowing which fittings to clean, planning for use based preventative maintenance and can also be used by designers to optimise future bathrooms designs. Smart Command provides costs savings for cleaning, fault analysis for maintenance, water efficiencies, insurance and potential rental uplift for owners. Modelling shows that for an installation of a typical 30 storey building, the ROI should in a break-even position within three years.

• Smart Command delivers touch free activation for sanitary fittings - concealed toilet suite, tapware, and urinal and offers the highest degree of hygiene and user wellbeing. • Intuitive LED interface to indicate that the toilet is ready for use and the tapware has sensed the user for activation. • User feedback from rigorous field tests over 2 years in high use commercial environments has resulted in a range of products that offer the highest level of quality, reliability and usability. • Smart Command is the missing link in building management systems, collecting water consumption and usage data from individual fittings, providing accurate water usage data not previously available in commercial buildings providing building managers with new digital services to understand, develop & validate strategies to minimize the consumption of water in the building. • Smart Command individual fittings provide highly accurate usage data, highlighting which fittings have been used and the need for them to be cleaned. Cleaning represents the highest operational costs for a building with expected cost savings in cleaning from the technology around 15%. • The Smart Command system has an integrated, cloud-based system management tool allows facility managers to monitor, control and report on all aspects of Smart Command device’s usage and status.