Controlco Tech Support at Work with The S4 Group

Parts distribution is so much more than selling controls these days. While management systems are getting more complex, it’s easy enough for anyone to buy a replacement valve or sensor on Amazon. At Controlco Automation Distributors, we make it a point to provide something extra.

Don’t get us wrong, we still rep tons of parts but for all of the product lines we represent, we offer a high level of technical support to get you through the job, to get you called back on the next job, and to help you keep relationships with contractors and building operators long into the future.

It’s the main reason we’re so comfortable offering new products to the building controls industry – products like the Tosibox lock and key series, the Optigo Connect line for fiber networking, FINStack, Kodaro and SkySpark to make it easier to implement analytics at the enterprise – because we know how to help you through installation and implementation.

The same is true for The S4 Group: Open BACnet N2 router. They’re designed to help buildings with legacy Johnson Controls and Metasys systems to prepare for the IoT transition without huge capital injection. But connecting old systems to new systems can be complicated. Here we’ll outline one example of how Controlco helped a contractor with an S4 Group: Open BACnet N2 router set point problem as one example of how we enable contractors and systems integrators to adopt new technologies and find success on the job site.

Recently a customer of The S4 Group: Open BACnet N2 Router contacted us during his Niagara integration. The Johnson VAV controllers we not able to schedule from Unoccupied to Occupied and the Occupied status also wasn’t working in the Niagara interface or The S4 Group: Open Management Console.

The points in the N2 router were labeled one way and the HVAC Pro command points were labeled another way. The customer needed to know what the points should be and how to change them. Complicating matters, the customer was at the end of his project. He needed to complete the job and the system wasn’t cooperating.

Within 24 hours, Controlco’s technical support lead got The S4 Group’s managing partner involved and began troubleshooting the issue. The three gathered via video conference for a remote access session through the system. They were able to determine that various site-specific issues were happening in the communication between The S4 Group: Open BACnet N2 Router and Niagara.

By a few months later, the project entered into the commissioning phase after a couple of changes were made to the source file in The S4 Group: Open BACnet N2 router so the building controls contractors could read and write to all of the points needed in the Johnson controller.

“After getting tech support [from Controlco and The S4 Group] I was able to recreate the issue and fix it reliably multiple times,” the contractor reported at the end of the job.

It would have been easier to simply sell the product and let the contractor into the wild without a person to call on. But we prefer that jobs get done right.