Remote Regulation of Municipal Buildings in Toulouse Métropole
Smart Energy
HVAC
Toulouse is the 4th largest city in France. It has 470,000 inhabitants and is part of Toulouse Métropole, which represents 750,000 inhabitants. The city’s technical services manage 2,850 municipal buildings across the territory with the ongoing goal of optimizing energy consumption.
355 SOFREL devices installed
As a long-standing client of LACROIX, the city of Toulouse implemented remote management as early as 1985 with the goal of achieving energy savings. Telemanagement provides city agents with a thorough understanding of site operations. It helps optimize the teams’ interventions in the field and enables them to act before users notice any issues.
Today, telemanagement includes 355 SOFREL remote stations installed in municipal buildings such as schools, nurseries, gyms, swimming pools, social and cultural centers, performance halls, etc. These buildings have quite diverse systems to monitor. Whether it’s domestic hot water, boiler rooms, cooling production, photovoltaics, or lighting control, the city’s teams intervene across a wide range of areas.
Our role is to provide maintenance teams with a tool for data collection and remote control, as well as for more specific missions such as the Energy Mission, which collects metering information. We even offer external users the possibility to manage the hourly scheduling of performance halls
Jacques DUCROS
Head of Maintenance and Workshop Division
Once deployed on-site, SOFREL equipment ensures the transmission of reliable data to the technical department supervisors. The most commonly used telemanagement features are alarms and status/measurement monitoring, which are essential for diagnostics. For corrections, the teams can act directly on commands and setpoints related to heating curves and, more broadly, to remotely control the installations.
From Telemanagement to Remote Regulation of Climate Systems
Frédéric Kapfer, Telemanagement Technician / GTEB, points out that the advantage of SOFREL S500 TH or SOFREL S4TH devices is that the program is embedded. He can retrieve it on-site and make the necessary modifications without fear of errors. He particularly values their ability to communicate with devices from other brands (regulators, PLCs…) and the fact that they come pre-programmed, which facilitates their integration.
SOFREL remote regulation stations offer programming in FBD or LADDER language integrated into the automation environment for managing heating systems and boiler cascades. They enable all building telemanagement data to be sent back to the central supervision system.
In the past, we deployed many S500 TH units, and today we are increasingly installing SOFREL S4TH on small and medium-sized sites. The advantage is that in addition to the unifying function of these devices, we also get full regulation of our installations. We truly have two products in one. Having both remote management and regulation integrated into the same device allows us to rationalize costs — and above all, the fewer devices we have, the lower the risk of failure.
Alexandre GIBRAT
Head of the Telemanagement Unit / GTEB
Alexandre Gibrat explains that, for a large city like Toulouse, having a telemanagement system is extremely important. It is an excellent tool for rationalizing expenses and, most importantly, for closely monitoring technical installations. Telemanagement helps them achieve energy savings, which remains a major challenge for any city of this size.
Video testimonial recorded in Toulouse
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