Assessing occupants' energy-load variation in commercial and educational buildings: Occupancy detecting approach based on existing wireless network infrastructure

Abstract

Providing energy-consumption feedback has the potential to change people's behavior, a reality that has led to significant energy-usage reductions in residential buildings. However, it is challenging to provide feedback in commercial and educational buildings, because it is difficult to track occupants' behaviors and their corresponding energy usage - especially for temporary occupants. To make providing such feedback possible in commercial and educational buildings, this paper presents a coupled system that monitors the energy load for occupants who have wi-fi-enabled devices. The system benchmarks energy loads using an energy monitoring system that simultaneously detects occupancy and roughly estimates the residents' location through Wi-Fi access points. A preliminary experiment was conducted in an educational building to illustrate the data processing procedure and to test the validity of the system. The experiment results suggest that the event of wireless connection is a valid indication of energy load variation. The proposed system is the prototype of a coupled system that, in the future, will be able to estimate an individual's energy load through an indoor positioning system and, in turn, provide corresponding energy-consumption feedback. © 2014 American Society of Civil Engineers.