No abstract

Humans spend 90% of their lives inside buildings, but often the Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems of commercial buildings do not properly maintain occupant comfort. Use of feedback through comfort voting applications has been shown to improve the quality of service, but the effects of application feedback and user interface design has not been investigated. In this work, we present several methods of feedback that use data presentation and environmental interaction in comfort voting applications. Through a 40 week user study of 61 University employees across 3 buildings, we show that feedback systems can be used to increase user satisfaction with thermal conditions from 33.9% to 93.3% and reduce energy consumption up to 18.99% compared to a system without voting. In addition, we find that by including a drifting control strategy, we find energy savings up to 37% can be realized without a significant reduction in satisfaction.

No abstract

In this work, we propose that irrigation systems with distributed independent actuation can substantially reduce water consumption in lawn irrigation. To test this theory, we develop a computationally light fluid flow model that allows the optimization of valve scheduling using standard optimization techniques. With these optimized valve schedules, we then show in simulation that water savings up to 64% are possible over commonly-used ad-hoc watering schedules on a sample university lawn. Extended to all irrigated space on our campus, these savings reflect a reduction of approximately 20 M gallons annually, a savings of $112,000.

Buildings are often inefficiently conditioned. Rooms that are empty are needlessly conditioned and partially filled rooms are conditioned assuming maximum occupancy. In this demonstration, we describe a system that reduces energy consumption by opportunistically reducing energy consumption based on room usage; we only condition rooms currently occupied and condition the space based on realtime occupancy measurements. We will show how a thermal sensor array can be used measure occupancy in real-time and how this occupancy information can be integrated with a real building management system in order to control the heating, cooling, ventilation and lighting of a building to optimize energy usage.