An upgrade to the Rome-Floyd County Library is expected to bring savings to the county in the long run but is also netting an unexpected technological boon.

The company installing electronically monitored controls in the library’s heating and air system, Honeywell, has decided to upgrade the already planned upgrade.

Floyd County Facilities Manager Ryan Davis told the county Public Works Committee on Wednesday that they are putting in a program that will provide mobile device access for the systems free of charge.

The upgrade will allow heating and air controls to be integrated into an application on a smartphone or tablet.

“Because this is something new that they’ve been working on, they want to see how it will do and show it as a demo,” Davis said.

Davis said it was something that was a little bit more cutting edge than what is in other county buildings but the beginning of something that could be on the horizon.

“Ideally, one day we could possibly have it so a tablet can be used to access almost any system in our buildings,” Davis said.

Instead of installing the basic controls program, Honeywell is installing the most recently developed program that it has been working on.

“I think something that we’ve tried to do from a maintenance perspective is incorporate technology,” Davis said. “This really takes us leaps forward in how we handle our maintenance.”

The investment of a monitored system is expected to bring savings.

A similar system was installed in The Forum and the adjacent judicial building, and it produced a savings of approximately $216,000 in energy usage per year.

The upgrade of the building’s systems is costing a little more than $100,000, according to Davis, with 50 percent of that funded through state library grants.

The work in the library began in December, but it has been slowed a fraction because of the upgrade. It is expected to be finished in April.

“Things have slowed just a bit, but we’re really getting some neat advantages out of it,” Davis said.