Share thisImagine the following scenario: you are the director of an animal care facility that is currently monitored with a building management system (BMS). Your facility is a small portion of a large building and the BMS provides the air handling, heating, and cooling for the entire building, not just your animal care facility. The engineering or facilities department supervises the management and control of the system. One evening, the temperature begins to rise in your transgenic mouse room. At the same time, an air handler on the roof begins to have a problem. Engineering is notified of both situations. The responding engineer sees both issues as stemming from the same problem but he has no data to support his conclusion. He disregards the rising temperature in your transgenic mouse room and begins to solve the issue with the air handler. Several hours and many thousand of dollars later, the air handler has been repaired, but the mouse colony has been compromised and valuable research has been forfeited.
Checks and BalancesBenchmarking and Compliance
Sound familiar? Have you experienced a similar situation in your own facility? Unfortunately, this story is not as far-fetched as might be believed. It happens every day in facilities where a BMS is being used to monitor the animal care rooms. But, it doesn?t have to be that way. Many animal care directors are recognizing the need for a redundant monitoring system in their facility.
Now imagine this scenario: you are the director of an animal care facility that is using an independent monitoring system specifically designed for your facility. An air handler on the roof fails at the same time that the temperature begins to rise in your transgenic mouse room. Engineering is notified through the BMS that the air handler has failed. Your staff receives a phone call telling them exactly which mouse room is out of temperature, the current temperature in the room, and how far the temperature is out of normal parameters. Your staff is able to react quickly and move the animals without risking loss of the animals or any research. When you arrive in the morning, you have comprehensive reporting of exactly when the room temperature began to rise, who responded, and what happened in response to the alarm. You are in control of your facility.
An independent environmental monitoring system puts the control of the animal care facility into the hands of the investigators, the director, and the staff. The system is redundant to the BMS within the animal care facility but it allows for a check and balance between the air handling system and the monitoring system. Building management systems are designed to monitor and control the heating, air conditioning, and ventilation for the entire building. Environmental monitoring systems are designed to collect data and provide alarm notification for specific and critical environmental inputs within your facility.
In most cases, a BMS will install probes throughout the buidling to monitor temperature and humidity in ?zones.? Each room is not monitored independently because heating and air conditioning are not typically controllable on a room-by-room basis. An environmental monitoring system, however, will allow for independent probes in each animal room for ambient temperature, humidity, light, and even sound. These probes can be programmed, monitored, and accessed for reporting independent of each other.