Lately, a lot of emphasis is placed on the energy performance of the houses, knowing that by March 2020, Romania has to transpose into the national legislation Directive 2018/844 / EU on the energy performance of buildings. This will impose on the builders and owners of buildings important rules, such as the obligation to install equipment for electric vehicles charging and systems for automation and control of energy consumption.
Energy efficiency measures can reduce the energy consumption of a building by up to 40%. The thermal energy for heating and hot water represents about 70% of the consumption of a residential building. Due to the proper thermal insulation and the implementation of efficient heating or energy monitoring solutions, the energy consumption can be reduced by half.
Even if the building is built, key elements of a smart home can be brought. This can mean maintaining an optimum indoor temperature, both summer and winter, without high costs. When we open the windows in winter, the heating system must make a greater effort to reheat the house, generating additional costs, and in the summer the same thing happens with the air conditioner. With VIKI all these aspects can be controlled and carefully monitored.
The energy monitoring module was created to provide the user in real time with more information on how the energy spent in his home is used at all times of the day, month or current year, in a simple and convenient way, directly from the application. Designed to work with a smart monitor (on z-wave technology), it ensures continuous monitoring of values such as instant consumption, voltage, current intensity, power factor etc.
The software automatically calculates the energy consumption and monitors the voltage variations during the day, as well as the intensity of the electricity, along with the power factor, offering relevant graphs for all the parameters it monitors.
The graph below shows the variation of the energy consumption according to the times of the day (eg Saturday / weekend) and the peaks of consumption can be observed:
In this example you can observe the variations of the electrical voltage in the VIKI test system, depending on the time interval taken into account:
The Archive option offers the possibility of monthly monitoring of energy consumption, allowing the analysis of variations and their multiannual comparison.
The VIKI application allows the automatic transmission of the smart digital monitor reading in the user’s e-mail.
Other changes being implemented to make the energy consumption of a house controlled by VIKI more efficient: setting rooms heating alarm due to the outside temperature when windows are open.
After a reasonable period of use of the module and continuous accumulation of data, in the next step we intend to develop a system of prediction of daily or hourly consumption, so that VIKI can decide how to manage multiple energy sources (solar, wind turbine, battery system or national network).