Following the recently completed commissioning activities in Granada, the SMARTeeSTORY team travelled to Riga City Hall to carry out the next phase of onsite system start‑up and verification. Riga is the last of the three demonstrator buildings where installations were finalised, making it a key milestone as the project shifts from hardware deployment to full digital system operation.
team on-site
Over the past months, all SMARTeeSTORY demo sites have been busy installing hardware needed to prepare each building for smart‑ready energy management. In Riga, this work was led by the Riga Energy Agency, who deployed sensors, PowerTag electrical monitoring devices, room controllers, gateways, communication lines, and the site’s automation server. They have been carefully adapting the project’s digital technology to a historic government building with strict architectural constraints.
Once these installations were finalised, Schneider Electric, together with system‑integration partner Faler, moved into commissioning and system start‑up. During the trip, the team conducted a detailed validation of each component to ensure safe, stable and reliable operation before entering the monitoring phase.
The team carried out some key tasks relevant to connectivity and hardware integration:
Connectivity checks:
- Verification of power availability for all newly installed devices,
- Testing Modbus communication real‑time between room controllers
- Confirming that HVAC, lighting and shading logic responded correctly to the building’s control specifications.
Hardware integration checks:
- Integration of already existing EV chargers on the ground floor into the system
- Activation of the weather station to optimise for environmental conditions such as wind, rain, and temperature
- Assessed of existing shading systems to determine how they can be automated in the next stages
Critically, the remote connection to the system was validated and a dedicated VPN was configured, ensuring secure cloud‑based access for monitoring and control. The automation server was successfully brought online and began generating operational trend data and alarm logs. This data will be essential for understanding how the building behaves before implementing advanced control strategies.
With all systems now online, Riga City Hall is fully prepared for integration into SMARTeeSTORY’s smart automation infrastructure. The equipment installed over the past months is now connected, communicating and functioning as a unified system, ready to support the project’s next steps.
As with the earlier visit to Granada, this commissioning trip underscores the importance of close collaboration between Schneider Electric, local partners and municipal authorities. The upcoming monitoring phase will now allow the project to collect real‑time data from Riga City Hall and track its progress toward becoming a smart, energy‑efficient heritage building.
