Development of web-based IoT comfort index and electricity consumption estimation monitoring microcontroller system with wireless sensor modules for air-conditioning system.

Abstract

Nowadays, electricity consumption especially in Malaysia has increased by the year. One of the factors that led to the increase in electricity consumption of a building is the usage of air conditioners (AC). The inability of conventional AC remote controls to monitor indoor environment conditions of the building will lead to unnecessary extreme temperature setting, then causing unnecessary high electrical consumption. Also, the conventional AC remote control is not able to store and perform analysis on the environment condition data of the building for the use of energy management strategy. The conventional AC remote control is only able to show the temperature set point value of the system, which could not represent the comfort experienced by occupants. In this project, a new device which can monitor the indoor environment condition and estimated electricity consumption on a web server is developed. The device monitors a comprehensive thermal comfort index Predicted Mean Vote (PMV) representing the comfort experienced by the occupants. The device is equipped with wireless sensor modules for indoor and outdoor remote monitoring. The device can monitor the outdoor temperature, indoor temperature, and indoor relative humidity along with indoor PMV value and electricity consumption. This device can grant advance feature to conventional AC remote control without causing physical modification to the existing system.