Although initially more expensive than direct lead connections, the advantages of the serial bus are minimal bus cost and installation labor. The system replaces all the leads to all the monitoring points by one pair of leads, new units can be added to the bus with no extra wiring, a plug and play feature is provided, giving faster control, and programming that is the same for all systems. Higher accuracies are obtained than using analog and more powerful diagnostics are available. As the cost of integration and development lowers, the bus system with its features will become more cost effective than the present systems.