mmeaMeasurement, Monitoring and Environmental Assessment

Indoor air indexand energy consumption

Success case

One of the Work Packages under the Measurement, Monitoring and Environmental Efficiency Assessment (MMEA) program is concerned with developing business applications for the MMEA Platform. The MMEA Platform is a cloud-based comprehensive solution for real-time environmental monitoring, analyzing and reporting. The tool acts as a backbone for collecting and standardizing data formats to be further utilized in various applications. The Work Package was set up to discover and implement actual business applications that could be sold to corporate customers.

The result of a two-year collaborative work between VTT, Metropolia University of Applied Sciences and FATMAN Oy is a demo of a system that measures indoor air index and energy consumption. The system comprises of sensors and software. The sensors are physically installed in a facility to measure needed indicators. The data is then fed to the software infrastructure to be recorded and acted upon. The need for this application arises mostly from building owners and managers, who are increasingly concerned with optimizing energy efficiency of their facilities. Since governmental regulation regarding energy efficiency in buildings is also growing, the need for more advanced real estate ERPs has become more acute.

The biggest problem in operating any indoor air index and consumption system is to acquire data from the facility managers. In the past the data was either manually logged in or acquired through expensive sensors.

Today the sensors cost six times less their previous price and wireless networks that would connect the sensors with the software system are more easily available. These changes make is much easier to implement complex automation and metering services that the group uses to develop advanced business applications.

Apart from eliminating the need for facility managers to input data or overpay for physical sensors, the system developed also simplifies and automates the software that supports the process. In practice, this would mean that using the system facility managers would know

when to cool down or pre-heat the building based on the indoor conditions measured by the sensors. Having access to this information and being able to act on it in real-time saves energy and makes the facilities more comfortable.

At the moment the group behind the research and work are further discussing with potential customers what kinds of features and capabilities the system would need to have in order to be most beneficial for them.

Establishment of a centralized marketplace called ENVITORI where the data could be purchased is in progress. Having a resource like that would eliminate the need to measure the same indicators by several different actors, cutting down installation and maintenance costs. It would also breed ground for development of companies that specialize in selling such measurements and not just sensors.

Indoor air index and energy consumption

For more information: MMEA Program Manager Tero Eklin, tero.eklin@cleen.fi