Reducing energy consumption with IoT prototyping

Abstract

Nowadays, energy consumption and especially energy saving, are topics of great importance. Recent news regarding global warming has increased the need to save energy. In Finland, one of the major sources of energy consumption is housing. Furthermore, the heating of residential buildings accounts for up to 68% of housing energy consumption. Therefore, it is not surprising that apartment energy consumption and ways to save energy <br/>in housing are a popular research topic in Finland. In this paper, two different research areas are introduced: First, a literature survey is presented on the research subjects of energy saving in the area of real estate and housing. The goal is to gain overall knowledge of the current state of energy saving research. The overall conclusion is that knowledge of energy consumption improves efforts toward energy saving. Second, rapid prototyping with off-the-shelf devices and open source software are described. These devices are cheap to install, and a wide range of sensors are available. Consequently, it is important to deal with these topics together. The former studies provide knowledge about the usage of open hardware, open software, and open architectures with the development of prototype systems for gathering data. The literature survey gives us new information on the <br/>specialties of energy consumption measuring, offering a new area for modeling and developing prototype systems. These experiences will be taken forward and utilized in energy saving and environmentally sustainable solutions, such as Green Computing.