Thermovote: Participatory Sensing for Efficient Building HVAC Conditioning

Varick Erickson, Alberto E. Cerpa

Abstract

Thermal comfort has traditionally been measured solely by temperature. While other methods such as Predicted Mean Vote (PMV) are available for measuring thermal comfort, the parameters required for an accurate value are overly complicated to obtain and require a great deal of sensory input. This paper proposes to bypass overly cumbersome or simplistic measures thermal comfort by bringing humans in the loop. By using humans as sensors, we can accurately adjust temperatures to improve occupant comfort. We show that occupants are more comfortable with a system that continually adjusts to thermal preference than a system that attempts to predict user comfort based on environmental factors. In addition, we also show that such a system is able to save 10.1% energy while improving the quality of service.

Availability

PDF

Reference

Varick Erickson, Alberto E. Cerpa, "Thermovote: Participatory Sensing for Efficient Building HVAC Conditioning," Proceedings of the Fourth ACM Workshop on Embedded Sensing Systems for Energy-Efficient Buildings (BuildSys 2012), pp. 9--16, ACM, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 2012.

Bibtex

@Conference{Erickson12a,
  author =       "Varick Erickson and Alberto E. Cerpa",
  title =        "Thermovote: Participatory Sensing for Efficient
                 Building {HVAC} Conditioning",
  booktitle =    "Proceedings of the Fourth ACM Workshop on Embedded
                 Sensing Systems for Energy-Efficient Buildings
                 (BuildSys 2012)",
  year =         "2012",
  pages =        "9--16",
  address =      "Toronto, Ontario, Canada",
  publisher =    "ACM",
  URL =          "http://www.andes.ucmerced.edu/papers/Erickson12a.pdf",
  accept =       "28",
  cited =        "10",
}

Copyright

This paper is copyright © 2012 by its authors. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial purposes. New copies must bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission of the authors.