ISH, held every two years in Frankfurt, describes itself as “The world’s leading trade fair The Bathroom Experience, Building, Energy, Air-conditioning Technology, Renewable Energies”. At Neurobat we develop systems for improved and more efficient indoor climate control systems, and it was only natural that we attend as visitors.

A small party from our company visited the fair, which was spread out over 12 halls according to topics. Each of these halls would have easily required at least half a day do it proper justice, so it was obviously not possible to visit the entire fair.

My professional interests made me focus on two domains: heating systems and control systems. Here are some key observations, together with some pictures I took:

Internet connectivity

This was a recurring theme in the heating systems hall. Every single heating system manufacturer seemed to have a solution to connect their system to the “Internet Of Things”.

There appears to be two main benefits from having your system connected to the web: remote control and remote maintenance. Remote control is all about having the possibility (usually through some app) to control your house remotely. Remote maintenance is more aimed at the installer, who will have the possibility to remotely monitor, and proactively intervene on, your system.

It is hard to determine if this is a fad or a long-term trend, but I am very excited by the latter possibility.

Lack of awareness about advanced control algorithms

It is fairly well known that the standard weather-compensated heating control systems in wide use today deliver a suboptimal energy performance. When I visited the control systems hall, I was looking forward to finding proposals for more advanced control algorithms.

I was therefore a bit disappointed to find no such offer. Manufacturers of control systems appear to have made a lot of progress in making their systems easier to program and configure, with easy-to-use graphical programming interfaces, but when you drill down into their library of standard components you always find the good old heating curve.

That being said, I did visit a few booths and asked how open, as a manufacturer, they were to letting third-parties provide add-on components to their library of elements. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that more often than not, the response was positive.