Optimize your energy consumption and your comfort at the same time, it's possible!
March 28, 2022
When we hear about the reduction of energy consumption, we spontaneously say to ourselves that we must save money and we don't see how this can be done at the expense of comfort. But think again!
What is energy optimization?
From a scientific point of view, energy optimisation corresponds to minimising the consumption of a building while respecting a certain number of constraints. These are of a physical nature (e.g. heating allows the temperature of a room to be maintained at the desired set point, but this changes according to thermal parameters such as the quality of the building's insulation or external parameters such as the outside temperature or sunshine), but are also related to the respect of comfort in buildings (minimum and maximum desired temperatures at the times when the different rooms are occupied).
What does this mean in practice?
From a practical point of view, minimising consumption while respecting comfort means hunting down energy waste of any kind. Waste can be easy to detect (e.g. heating left on over a weekend) or much more insidious. Let's imagine a building that the occupants leave at 7pm and whose comfort zone is between 19 and 23 degrees. Quite logically, they set the thermostat to 21 and thus ensure that they stay within this range. When they leave, they turn off the heating. In reality, by turning off the heating 30 minutes earlier, the temperature would have remained in the building for the last 30 minutes if its insulation is considered standard (this is called thermal inertia). The last half hour of heating is therefore unnecessary consumption and can be eliminated.
How do you know exactly whether 15, 30 or 45 minutes of heating is unnecessary?
This is where data analysis and artificial intelligence come into play. By gathering in real time all the information available on your building, it is possible to model its behavior and thus to implement strategies to optimize your energy consumption while guaranteeing your comfort. And often the strategy evolves during the day: it is therefore preferable that the implementation of this protocol is fully automated, which is possible with the solution developed by Agrid! It is therefore possible to combine the reduction of energy consumption with the maintenance of comfort.
Couldn't we improve comfort while we're at it?
Well, yes! In the following example on thermal inertia used to anticipate the switch-off of heating systems, it is possible to find the right moment to preheat the building in the same way! In order not to be cold when arriving in the morning, one would usually have to leave the heating on all night, which would be an ecological and financial aberration... some systems have a programming, but as it is difficult to anticipate without exhaustive data (especially as the evolution of the temperature in a building depends on external solicitations and thus evolves from one day to another), one starts either too early or too late, and one cannot regulate efficiently one's own temperature set point... a fully automated artificial intelligence will solve this problem! By compiling all the available data and thanks to a fine modeling, it will determine precisely when to start the heating and at what level... and as a bonus it will do it without human intervention! No need to think about your consumption or your comfort, our solution takes care of everything!