Hot, cold and in between
Neil Klingensmith, Joseph Bomber, Suman Banerjee · 2014
Forced-air heating and cooling systems frequently perform poorly in multi-story homes. Long, leaky ducts running from the heater or air conditioner to the rooms of the house can impede airflow to second story rooms, creating dramatic temperature differentials between different spaces in the house. Such temperature discrepancies can lead not only to occupant discomfort, but also to energy waste since the thermostat would have to be set higher to achieve the desired temperature in some rooms. In this work, we propose a decentralized platform for heating and cooling systems in medium-sized homes that aims to independently control the temperature of each room. The goal of this approach is to provide heating and cooling necessary for poorly conditioned individual rooms to reach the required comfort level. By heating and cooling different rooms to different setpoints at different times, we can leverage our understanding about the way spaces in the home are actually used in order to fine-tune the environmental settings. We show that our techniques can both increase the residents' comfort and decrease the energy used by the house's heating and cooling system. In our primary test home, we estimate that our techniques could reduce natural gas consumption by roughly 18\% during the coldest months of the heating season while increasing the temperature in the most-used living spaces by 2-5 degrees Fahrenheit.