Data collection for an individual heat consumption measurement system using a Zigbee wireless network

Abstract: Individual heat/energy measurements have been a hot topic in Europe during the last 50 years, both for fair reasons and for energy saving reasons. The argument for using individual heat/energy measurements for fair reasons is that no one should pay more than he or she consumes no matter if the person lives in a rental apartment or in a house. Previous studies have shown that individual heat/energy measurements will lower the total energy consumed, when each tenant of a multi-apartment building has to pay for the actual amount of the consumed heat/energy individually. Unfortunately the installation cost of an individual heat/energy measurement system is considered to be high, so the economical arguments for installing this type of system in existing and new buildings have not been fullled. One reason for this is that until recently all of these systems used wired solutions. However the publication of the two wireless standards ZigBee and Zwave have opened new possibilities for creating entirely standardized wireless systems, reducing both the installation time and cost. The goal of this thesis work is to evaluate the possibilities for developing such a system based on the ZigBee standard. The work began with a study of the existing systems (hardware systems) available from some companies in Sweden (Brunata, Metrima, Siemens Building Technologies and Techem). This work also covers some communication protocols used (M-bus, BACnet, ZigBee) and dierent sensors (temperature, humidity, water consumption, and heat) used in an individual heat/energy measurement system. Based on this information a central data collection software server for windows has been developed. This together with a client application and a database server gives an entire software suite for data collection and data analysis of a ZigBee based heat/energy measurement system.