::: nBlog :::
During the last five years, I’ve been able to increase the energy (and financial) efficiency of our home buildings by more than 40 percent. Although I’ve installed solar collectors, PV panels and more efficient pumps, they account less than half of the feat.
These buildings were connected to the BaseN Platform in 2006. There’s now a total of 129 sensors and 41 actuators, sensing everything from indoor CO2 to heating liquid pressure. These generate some 50kbit/s constant measurement flow.
Measurements themselves are interesting and help in singular optimization tasks, but they’re easily forgotten, even when there are alert thresholds. (I surprisingly did receive an alert for outside temperature yesterday – had configured it in 2007 with +30C maximum).
The key is the algorithmic code base, a collection of spimes, which exists in the BaseN Platform with every single version of small code snippets stored in conjunction with the relevant measurement data. These spimes control heating, cooling, co2 levels, lighting, locking, garage doors, diesel generator, PV/wind battery bank charging, hot water circulation, perimeter security systems and a few other, bit more sensitive systems. They also receive manual commands from wall panels and mobile UIs.
The optimized code is already far more important than those physical components being controlled, and during the years I’ve indeed replaced and upgraded many of them.
To quote one of our recent customers, each building is a system. Mission critical it is, its digital running environment must be scalable, fault tolerant and distributed – that’s why my home runs in BaseN Platform.
//Pasi
