A building management systemwithout the enterprise price.

A BMS — also called a building automation and control system (BACS) — is the central system that monitors and controls a building’s services: heating, cooling, ventilation, lighting, metering, and often access and alarms. Instead of each system running on its own timeclock and thermostats, one controller coordinates them against occupancy, schedules and outside conditions, and gives the people running the building one place to see and change everything.

Enterprise BMS projects from the major vendors are typically priced per controlled point, plus engineering time and annual software licensing — which is why they rarely make sense below several thousand square metres. Our Loxone-based systems are priced from the points list with no software licensing at all: a plant room with monitoring and zoned heating control starts in the low thousands, and a full multi-floor office fit-out with HVAC, lighting, access and metering is usually a fraction of an equivalent enterprise quote. We survey first and price item by item, so you can see exactly what each part costs.

For larger buildings, yes. Since the 2021 update of Approved Document Part L, new non-residential buildings in England with a combined effective rated output for heating and air conditioning (including ventilation) over 290kW must be fitted with a building automation and control system. Even below that threshold, Part L pushes strongly towards zoned control, metering and monitoring — and the payback maths usually justify it regardless of compliance.

Yes — the platform is the same, the scale and the field devices change. The Miniserver speaks the commercial protocols (BACnet/IP, Modbus TCP/RTU, KNX, DALI, M-Bus, 0-10V), extensions rack into standard control panels, and the logic engine handles schedules, interlocks, load management and alarming. Loxone is used across commercial buildings in Europe precisely because the licensing model that makes enterprise BMS expensive does not exist here. What it is not: a replacement for an estate-wide Siemens or Trend deployment with a dedicated facilities team — and we will tell you if that is what your building actually needs.

Often, yes. Where existing plant controllers speak BACnet or Modbus we can integrate them rather than replace them, and where a legacy system is dead or orphaned we can usually reuse the field wiring, valves and sensors — the expensive part of the original install — and replace only the controls layer. The survey establishes what is actually fitted before anything is quoted.

Nothing, operationally. All control logic runs locally on the Miniserver in the building — schedules, climate control, access doors and alarms carry on. You lose remote access and notifications until the connection returns. There is no cloud dependency and no subscription that can lapse.

We are based in Hatch End (HA5) and work across Greater London and the Home Counties. Commercial surveys are free, and takeover enquiries — buildings with orphaned controls nobody can administer — are welcome; it is a significant part of our workload on the access-control side already.