Energy saving by context aware heating

Abstract

A significant part of the overall energy consumption of office buildings and households in Europe is consumed for heating. Today's standard is that heaters are controlled by thermostats so that the desired temperatures are maintained for set periods. We now present ConAH (Context Aware Heating) that controls heaters so that heating periods are minimized while keeping the comfort of the occupants. ConAH utilizes information about future presences of occupants in the rooms, called location context of the occupants. To minimize the heating periods and save energy, heaters are switched on just sufficiently before and during usage times of the room and are switched off in all other cases. To calculate the moments to switch heaters on (heat up) or off (cool down), ConAH needs: 1. the future occupancies of the room. Future room occupancies are obtained via the prediction of the occupant's context, here in terms of location. 2. the time that the room needs to heat up or to cool down between two reference temperatures. This is called the room's heating and cooling profile and is determined by experiments in a real meeting room, as well as by simulations. We present the potential energy savings of ConAH compared to a standard controller with a thermostat and explain the effects that are responsible for these results.