Allied Climate Professionals sent Students to Boot Camp

One of our newest S4 Integration Partners came to boot camp this month. Allied is located in South Dakota and are anticipating a number of integrations in the “West River” region of the state.

Allied Climate Professionals was on the edge of starting an integration using the S4 Open: BACnet-N2 Router and had the foresight to schedule a boot camp the week before the project installation.

Trent Kahre, Co-Owner of Allied Climate professionals, and Jeff Opsahl, IT Controls Specialist, have a combined experience of over 30 years in controls technology, including some familiarity with the JCI architecture and system installations.

As with every S4 Boot Camp, the sessions were a combination of lectures, demonstrations, Q&A sessions, and hands on experience. The students were asked to bring their own BAS and global controller as well as their copy of the Metasys® M-Tools configuration and commissioning utilities to support the hands on exercises. They came to the boot camp with lots of questions, the most prominent was “How does the S4 router enable us to read the JCI controls data on our Delta enteliWEB front end?” As they participated in the hands on lab portion of the training, Trent commented, “When I could see the points come into enteliWEB I was relieved and happy. As far the integration job on Monday now I feel a lot more confident going to the job site. “

Trent and Jeff were tested to determine if they were learning the lessons, best practices, etc. that the S4 team was sharing. At one point in time when the students were occupied in a lecture session, one of the S4 staff stealthily unplugged some of the N2 bus cables in the test bed. During the next lab exercise they were able to use the skills and tools available to them to identify and fix the problem. They passed the test!
Jeff was a little more reserved in his evaluation of the project, but stated “When points came up in the training lab I could see the same JCI devices that I will be using on the job. This is a great experience to have.”

All of the questions were answered, especially the most prominent one. More importantly, they proved that they could use these new skills when they went to the job site the following week and had a very successful integration experience. Their expectations are that this is the first of many projects to come.