Integrating Smart Ceiling Fans and Communicating Thermostats to Provide Energy-Efficient Comfort

The project goal was to identify and test the integration of smart ceiling fans and communicating thermostats. These highly efficient ceiling fans use as much power as an LED light bulb and have onboard temperature and occupancy sensors for automatic operationbased on space conditions. The Center for the Environment (CBE) at UC Berkeley led the research team including TRC, Association for Energy Affordability (AEA), and Big Ass Fans (BAF). The research team conducted laboratory tests, installed99 ceiling fans and 12 thermostats in four affordable multifamily housing sites in California’s Central Valley, interviewed stakeholders to develop a case study, developed an online design tool and design guide, outlined codes and standards outreach, and published several papers.The project team raised indoor cooling temperature setpoints and used ceiling fans as the first stage of cooling; this sequencing of ceiling fans and air conditioningreducesenergy consumption, especially during peak periods, while providing thermal comfort.The field demonstration resulted in 39% measured compressor energy savings during the April–October cooling seasoncompared to baseline conditions, normalized for floor area. Weather-normalized energy use varied from a 36% increase to 71% savings, withmedian savings of 15%.This variability reflects the diversity in buildings, mechanical systems, prior operation settings, space types, andoccupants’ schedules,preferences, and motivations. All commercial spaces with regular occupancy schedules (and twoof the irregularly-occupied commercial spaces and one of the homes) showed energy savings on an absolute basis before normalizing for warmer intervention temperatures,and 10 of 13 sites showed energy savings on a weather-normalized basis. The ceiling fans provided cooling for one site for months during hot weather when the coolingequipment failed.Occupants reported high satisfaction with the ceiling fans and improved thermal comfort. This technology can apply to new and retrofit residential and commercial buildings

Statistical Model Checking for Stochastic Hybrid Systems

This paper presents novel extensions and applications of the UPPAAL-SMC model checker. The extensions allow for statistical model checking of stochastic hybrid systems. We show how our race-based stochastic semantics extends to networks of hybrid systems, and indicate the integration technique applied for implementing this semantics in the UPPAAL-SMC simulation engine. We report on two applications of the resulting tool-set coming from systems biology and energy aware buildings.Comment: In Proceedings HSB 2012, arXiv:1208.315

Mobile Application to Support Intelligent Supervision System for Service Buildings

The work developed and described in this dissertation is part of the Ambiosensing project, developed under the Portugal 2020 program. This project aims to design and develop a tool for the energy management of buildings, considering low implementation costs, adaptability, versatility, and easy maintenance in line with the premises of Industry 4.0. One of the main requirements of the project is related to the intelligent supervision of equipment, adaptability and optimization of energy efficiency and quality of comfort ofthe occupants of buildings.In this way, the problem that this dissertation addresses is related to the comfort of the occupants within a service building. For that purpose,an application for mobile devices was designed and developed complementing the Intelligent Supervision system developed in the project. This application makes it possibleto view the values of the registered environmental variables and allows the users of the spaces to leave their feedback regarding their feeling considering the presented values, in order to improve the performance of the supervision system. In addition toallowing the connection between the user and the system improving not only the system's performance, but the application also improves the user's experience inside the building.O trabalho desenvolvido e descrito nesta dissertação está integrado no projeto Ambiosensing, desenvolvido no âmbito do programa Portugal 2020. Este projeto tem como objectivo a concepção e desenvolvimento de uma ferramenta para a gestão energética de edifícios, considerando baixos custos de implementação, adaptabilidade, versatilidade e fácil manutenção alinhado com as premissas da Indústria 4.0. Um dos principais requisitos do projecto está relacionado com a supervisão inteligente dos equipamentos, adaptabilidade e optimização de eficiência energética e qualidade de conforto dos ocupantes dos edifícios. Desta forma, o problema que esta dissertação aborda está relacionado com o conforto dos ocupantes dentro de um edifício de serviços e para tal foi desenhada e desenvolvida uma aplicação para dispositivos moveis que serve de complemento ao sistema de Supervisão Inteligente desenvolvido no projecto. Esta aplicação possibilita a visualização dos valores das variáveis ambientais registados permite que os utilizadores dos espaços deixem o seu feedback em relação à sua sensibilidade sobre os valores apresentados, com o intuito de melhorar a performance do sistema de supervisão.Além de permitir a ligação entre o utilizador e o sistema melhorando,não só a performance do mesmo, a aplicação permite também melhorar a experiência do utilizador no interior do edifício

USEM: A ubiquitous smart energy management system for residential homes

With the ever-increasing worldwide demand for energy, and the limited available energy resources, there is a growing need to reduce our energy consumption whenever possible. Therefore, over the past few decades a range of technologies have been proposed to assist consumers with reducing their energy use. Most of these have focused on decreasing energy consumption in the industry, transport, and services sectors. In more recent years, however, growing attention has been given to energy use in the residential sector, which accounts for nearly 30% of total energy consumption in the developed countries. Here we present one such system, which aims to assist residential users with monitoring their energy usage and provides mechanisms for setting up and controlling their home appliances to conserve energy. We also describe a user study we have conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of this system in supporting its users with a range of tools and visualizations developed for ubiquitous devices such as mobile phones and tablets. The findings of this study have shown the potential benefits of our system, and have identified areas of improvement that need to be addressed in the future

A Prototype Toolkit For Evaluating Indoor Environmental Quality In Commercial Buildings

Measurement of building environmental parameters is often complex, expensive, and not easily proceduralized in a manner that covers all commercial buildings. Evaluating building indoor environmental quality performance is therefore not standard practice. This project developed a prototype toolkit that addressed existing barriers to widespread indoor environmental quality performance evaluation. A toolkit with both hardware and software elements was designed for practitioners around the indoor environmental quality requirements of the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Engineers / Chartered Institution of Building Services / United States Green Building Council Performance Measurement Protocols. This unique toolkit was built on a wireless mesh network with a web-based data collection, analysis, and reporting application. The toolkit provided a fast, robust deployment of sensors, real-time data analysis, Performance Measurement Protocol-based analysis methods and a scorecard and report generation tools. A web-enabled Geographic Information System-based metadata collection system also reduced field-study deployment time. The toolkit was evaluated through three case studies, which were discussed in this report

insights on pro environmental behavior towards post carbon society

Abstract The increasing phenomena related to urbanization and human impact on landscape leads to re-think the future of the cities. As well as in buildings, a careful design, the use of renewable sources and the use of advanced technical solutions, to achieve a significant energy savings, are strategies not sufficient to define a "Post-Carbon city" or a "Post-Carbon building". It is necessary that the citizen/occupant become a "Post-Carbon society", i.e. they pursue conscious lifestyle marked on energy saving principles. This suggest that the occupant's behaviour plays a fundamental role. In fact, many studies have shown that the human behaviour influences, mainly, the energy performance, explaining, in this way, the discrepancy gap between predicted and real consumptions. Since human behaviour is, in large part, influenced by several factors, a behavioural change towards sustainable lifestyle is desirable and this is possible, for examples, by providing to users feedback and information on comfort condition and energy use. The main goal of this research is to identify the pro-environmental behaviour by a questionnaire survey. Specifically, the structure of the survey will be described in this paper and the main results presented