About FractionalBAS.com

Most commercial buildings have no environmental monitoring. No sensor data. No visibility into air quality, energy waste, or whether the HVAC system is actually doing its job. FractionalBAS.com exists to help the people running those buildings understand their options and make informed decisions.

The Gap We Fill

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey, 94% of commercial buildings in the United States are under 50,000 square feet. Research from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimates that 87% of smaller commercial buildings have no building automation system at all.

That is 5.5 million buildings operating without basic environmental data. Their owners and operators make decisions based on complaints, gut feelings, and thermostats that may not reflect conditions anywhere beyond a single room.

The problem is not a lack of technology. Affordable monitoring systems exist. The problem is a lack of accessible, trustworthy guidance. Most building automation content is written for large commercial properties, facilities engineers at enterprise organizations, or the contractors who install full BAS systems. The building owner managing a handful of small offices, or the school facilities director working with a limited capital budget, has nowhere practical to go to learn what their options actually are.

FractionalBAS.com fills that gap. Every article on this site is written specifically for building owners and facility managers running commercial buildings under 100,000 square feet. The goal is practical, research-backed guidance that helps real people make real decisions about their buildings.

What Vendor-Neutral Actually Means

Vendor-neutral is easy to claim. Here is what it means in practice on this site.

We do not accept sponsored content, paid placements, or affiliate arrangements of any kind. No vendor pays to be mentioned here. No product is recommended without an honest accounting of its trade-offs. When we discuss evaluation criteria for building monitoring systems, those criteria come from published research and recognized industry standards, not from any product’s feature sheet.

Every factual claim links to a primary source. We cite government agency reports, peer-reviewed studies, and recognized standards bodies: the Department of Energy, the EPA, ASHRAE, the Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey, and academic research. If a claim cannot be sourced, it does not appear here.

We publish a corrections policy and act on it. When we get something wrong, we correct it openly and document the change. You can read our full editorial approach in the Editorial Standards section.

Our Relationship to Xmark Labs and Nosy

FractionalBAS.com is operated by Xmark Labs, LLC, the company behind Nosy, a building monitoring platform for small commercial buildings. We are transparent about this because we think you should know it.

The site exists because we identified a real and documented gap in available educational content. Building owners and facility managers running smaller properties have no authoritative, vendor-neutral resource to help them understand building monitoring. That gap matters regardless of which product a building owner ultimately chooses.

Our goal with FractionalBAS.com is to be the most useful, most honest resource available on building monitoring for smaller buildings. That means the content here is designed to help you make a good decision, not to steer you toward any specific product. Nosy appears once, in a brief call-to-action at the end of relevant articles, clearly labeled and visually separated from the editorial content. It does not appear in article bodies, evaluation criteria, or comparisons.

If you want to learn about Nosy specifically, you can find that at whatisnosy.com.

How We Produce Content

Every article on FractionalBAS.com starts with the primary sources: government data, peer-reviewed research, and published industry standards. Our authors are required to cite sources for every statistical or regulatory claim and to structure content so that readers can verify what we say independently.

We write for practitioners, not academics. The goal of every article is that a reader who starts knowing nothing about a topic comes away with a practical sense of what to do next. We target an 8th-grade reading level by design. Not because our readers are not intelligent, but because complex subjects are better served by clear writing than by jargon.

Content is reviewed against our editorial standards before publication, including source verification and a reading level check. Articles that cover rapidly changing topics (regulatory requirements, equipment costs, standards revisions) are reviewed on a scheduled basis and updated when the underlying information changes.

About Pages

The Team Behind This Site

FractionalBAS.com is operated by Xmark Labs, LLC. Content is authored by building monitoring practitioners and technical writers with backgrounds in physics, engineering, and building science.