A web-based office climate control system using wireless sensors

Abstract

Conventional heating, ventilating, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems usually achieve the desired control level by means of simple ON–OFF control, which can often result in high energy wastage. A potential solution to this issue is intelligent self-regulating HVAC controllers, which base their actions/decisions on sensor data. In this paper, an office climate monitoring and control system is designed and implemented. The system consists of various wireless sensor nodes and a control node. The sensor nodes provide the sensor data necessary to determine occupancy and the control node executes the algorithm, which decides whether to activate cooling or heating based on the sensor data. This system can serve as a controller and can be integrated into HVAC systems in smart buildings. It is shown that the developed control algorithm executed on the control node results in an improvement of up to 39% in energy efficiency over conventional ON–OFF controllers for HVAC systems.