Overview
Heating, ventilation, and cooling (HVAC) accounts for 38% of building energy usage, and over 15% of all US energy usage, making it one of hte nation's largest energy consumers. Smart Zoning provides a 'snap-in' retrofit of existing centralized HVAC systems to enable energy savings when homes are occupied by providing targeted conditioning based on occupancy. Smart Zoning is a cyber-physical system that senses occupancy and temperature at a room-level granularity and uses intelligent control schemes to minimize energy wastage without compromising occupant comfort or HVAC equipment safety. Evaluations of Smart Zoning approaches in a residential building demonstrated energy savings of at least 14% over the existing whole-house conditioning scheme.
Publications
Tamim Sookoor, Timothy Hnat, Pieter Hooimeijer, Westley Weimer, and Kamin Whitehouse, "Macrodebugging: Global Views of Distributed Program Execution," The 7th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys 2009), Berkeley, CA, Nov. 2009. (PPT)