This year’s ISH fair (Installation, Sanitär, Heizung), held on March 10 to 14, 2015 in Frankfurt, Germany, had a slogan “Comfort meets technology”. It means that the companies aim to supply not only technologically advanced products, but also products with comfortable and easy operation. For systems and components for HVAC controls it means primarily easy-to-understand user interfaces with clean design. It showed primarily at room units, thermostats, and lights and blinds controllers with touchscreens and housings of simple shapes. Regarding system integrators, the point was in making configuration tools easy, and bringing part of the decision-making process to the engineering tools, thus cut down the engineering and commissioning time. Many booths claimed energy savings and energy management, which mostly meant classical SCADA systems and metering data acquisition, as energy management is expert activity, for which the SCADA and communication systems just provide the input data.
Domat Control System backed the hands-on experience this time. Visitors could try engineering and configuration tools at two test desks with both popular controllers (FC010, UC100, IPLC) and news like mark100 to markMX process stations range, programmable in Merbon IDE, the new engineering tool, which supports function blocks (FB) and structured text (ST) as well as compiling of customized function blocks. “Customers like especially support of standard communication protocols, like Modbus, OPC, and BACnet, together with more than 50 system drivers for third party systems, all of this well priced. The Domat components are used not only at homogenous building control systems, but also as a way how to integrate other technologies into third party SCADAs and management systems,” says Michal Šeda, head of product sales department. “With the most active distributors, Vedotech and S+S Regeltechnik, we discussed the market situation and acquired inspiration for further development.” Visitors were also attracted by a new room unit with hi-res colour touchscreen.
Domat Control System s.r.o. is Czech manufacturer of HVAC and energy control systems. The company was established in 2004, starting activities in energy management and control in 2008 by supplies of photovoltaic monitoring systems. About 55 % of the volume in 2013 was export.