Improving the heating eciency of detached houses by instant messaging

Abstract: House heating is responsible for substantial energy consumption in industrialized countries. However, the climate control in detached houses is often sub optimally done. These climate controllers are usually composed by subsystems that have limited information about the state of the building. Improvements usually requires large investments from the house owner, unless new sensor networks technologies are adopted. In this Master thesis, how to improve the eciency of house heating using instant messaging (IM) is investigated. Devices in an inhabited house have been congured to be connected by an IM client. This allows to perform automatic control through a simple software. The dynamical model of the heating and cooling system is studied and the relevant sensor measurements are identied. The possible reduction in heat consumption is quantied by simulations. It is shown that the method is applicable, and that it can result in a reduction of the heat consumption in detached houses, even by using a small subset of potential sensor measurements.