A Sensor Network for Existing Residential Buildings Indoor Environment Quality and Energy Consumption Assessment and Monitoring: Lessons Learnt from a Field Experiment

Abstract

Enhancing residential buildings energy efficiency has become a critical goal to take up current challenges of human comfort, urbanization growth and the consequent energy consumption increase. In a context of integrated smart infrastructures, sensor networks offer a relevant solution to support building energy consumption monitoring, operation and prediction. The amount of accessible data with such networks also opens new prospects to better consider key parameters such as human behaviour and to lead to more efficient energy retrofit of existing buildings. However, sensor networks planning and implementation in general, and in existing buildings in particular, is a particularly complex task facing many challenges and affecting the performances of such a promising solution. In the present paper, we report on a field experiment of a sensor network deployment involving more than 250 sensors in three collective residential buildings in Paris region for the evaluation of a deep energy retrofit. More specifically, we describe the whole process of the sensor network design and roll-out and highlight the main critical aspects in such complex process. We also provide a feedback after several months of the sensor network operation and preliminary analysis of collected data. Reported results path the way for an efficient and optimized design and deployment of sensor networks for energy and indoor environment quality monitoring in existing buildings.

A Wireless Sensor Network for Residential Building Energy and Indoor Environmental Quality Monitoring: Design, Instrumentation, Data Analysis and Feedback

“…The deployment of our sensor network provides valuable feedback on the main achievements and difficulties in the implementation of an instrumentation solution. Critical points to take into account can be summarized in three categories and are further described in [ 36 ]: Installation conditions and environment. The case study is a group of three existing buildings built in 1974.…”

“…In addition to the published results [ 36 ], the installation of sensors in households has highlighted a few more insights into the challenges of building energy monitoring, specifically on the limitations of radio frequencies. LoRaWAN is the main communication protocol of our sensor network.…”

Expectations and Outcomes when Quantifying Energy Improvements Achieved by Building Envelope Retrofitting

“…The models based on data collection (black box models) compile information into categories of variables that influence energy performance [30]. Recent research classified these variables into the following groups [31]: meteorological information, indoor environmental quality information [32,33], occupancy-related data [34][35][36][37][38], time indicators, building characteristics [39], socio-economic information [40] and historical data. The performance gap can only be bridged by adopting a broad and coordinated approach that includes the validation and verification of theoretical BES models [41].…”