In order to assure the highest efficiency operation of heating and cooling in buildings, it’s becoming more and more necessary to know exactly how energy is being generated as well as used in a building. Knowing the overall building loads profile isn’t enough. You need to be aware of the behavior of individual heating or cooling units throughout an installation.
Measuring the amount of energy being used to heat or cool a building requires an accurate account of the power used by all the units used in the installation. Particularly valuable in the analysis of heating and cooling energy usage is the measurement of the power used by heat pumps in the system. To this end, we have developed wireless energy monitors capable of measuring the current and water temperatures of Ground-Source Heat Pumps. When we know the power usage and the energy generated from the heat pumps, we can also calculate the COP and true efficiencies of the individual heat pumps in the system. This COP value can then be used to calculate the equivalent amount of CO2 that each heat pump is saving compared to fossil fuel systems.
Our IoT units can each monitor multiple single and 3-phase heat pumps, and they relay the collected data back to a local server where it is stored in a local database, collated, and then forwarded at defined intervals to our cloud servers for analysis and reporting.
To accurately determine the power, we also utilize either internal or external voltmeters to get an accurate voltage in the building for use in calculating the power usage. These voltmeters are constructed from AC-AC adapters, and the voltages are also wireless stored at the local and remote servers.