climify.org: an online solution for easy control and monitoring of the indoor environment

Abstract

Real energy performance of new and retrofitted buildings often consistently differs from expectations. While occupants might complain about poor indoor climate, the energy use in such buildings is often higher than expected, leading to the well-known phenomenon called “Energy Performance Gap”. In the past years, monitoring of buildings, both in terms of energy use and indoor climate conditions, was realised mostly for office buildings only, and at high financial costs. However, the exponential growth in availability of IoT devices, over the last years, opens now new scenarios for low-cost monitoring and control solutions of buildings. Yet, modern IoT devices are often only accessible online through the vendors’ software, although some devices make use of open communication protocols and can, therefore, be connected to open platforms such as openHAB. However, the use of open platforms is still connected to a big efforts for many final users. We, therefore, propose climify.org, an open platform for plug and play connection of IoT sensors and actuators, for easy monitoring and controlling of buildings and buildings’ HVAC systems. The platform climify.org offers, at time of writing, three main applications. The first application is an IoT device installation app, to be used on portable devices (e.g. mobile phones or tablets of system administrators): this app allows easily installing and locating a sensor or an actuator, within a building. The second application is an online service for data visualisation and HVAC control: while the monitoring data can be plotted, the service offers several data evaluation methods; moreover, the settings of the connected actuators can be modified and controlled. The third application can be installed on portable devices (mobile phones and tablets of buildings’ occupants) and allows occupants to provide feedback on their perception of the indoor climate through several questionnaires’ formats. Through the three applications developed within climify.org, we aim at providing the best indoor climate and the lowest energy use through a low-cost solution.