Device tracker helps lower energy costs
Tracking activity from laptops and mobile devices in public buildings helps cut the cost of heating and cooling by matching airflow to the number of people inside in real time.
Engineer Stefan Storey thought that if building control systems and Wi-Fi networks could talk to each other, then ventilation could ramp up in common areas and lecture halls that are busy and shut down in areas that are empty.
Well, the pilot system tested on the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre library at the University of British Columbia did just that and trimmed energy consumption by five per cent over 12 months.
UBC is so happy with the results that the system is being expanded to 10 core campus buildings, where savings are expected to hit $100,000 a year.
“We didn’t put in any new physical infrastructure and that can be the really expensive part of any new technology,” said Orion Henderson, director of energy planning and innovation at UBC Energy and Water Services.
Storey has already spun off a company — Sensible Building Science — to commercialize his idea.
The public sector in B.C. spends $400 million a year on energy bills, said Storey. The private sector spends many times that figure.
“We have proven savings of four to 10 per cent with existing projects, so we can go a long way to reducing the cost of heating,” he said.
Storey found that mobile activity could be a reliable indicator of how many people are in a particular area of a building, a challenging thing to automate.
The population of indoor spaces on campus can change dramatically from minute to minute as students flood in and out of classes.
“It was immediately obvious to us as energy managers that this would be really useful information,” said Henderson. “The university’s IT department — and they are keyholders to the movement of this information — was also really enthusiastic about it.”
A collaboration was quickly brought together by the university’s sustainability initiative, Campus as a Living Laboratory, to create the “middleware” needed to get the two systems talking. A $130,000 sustainability grant allowed Storey’s firm to fine-tune the software being used in the expansion.
The software gathers data from devices on the university’s existing Wi-Fi network and strips it of all identifying information.