An experimental investigation of occupancy-based energy-efficient control of commercial building indoor climate

Abstract

We present results from a week-long experimental evaluation of a scalable control algorithm for a commercial building heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) system. The experiments showed that the controller resulted in 37% energy savings without sacrificing indoor climate. In contrast to prior work that reports energy savings without a careful measure of the effect on indoor climate, we verify that the controller achieves the energy efficiency improvements without any adverse effect on the indoor climate compared to the building's baseline controller. This is established from measurements of a host of environmental variables and analysis of before-after occupant survey results. We present a complete system to retrofit existing buildings including the control algorithm and the supporting execution platform which includes the deployment of a wireless sensor network. Results show that there is a large variation in energy savings from zone to zone, which indicates that estimating energy savings potential of novel HVAC control systems is not trivial even from experiments—something that prior work with uniformly positive messages did not emphasize.