IoT-Based Non-intrusive Energy Wastage Monitoring in Modern Building Units

Energy wastage is common in commercial buildings. There are many occasions that lighting, heating/cooling, and ventilation systems remain ON even when the area is unoccupied. However, conserving energy while having no effect on the occupants’ activities for different rooms in a building is a challenging objective. In this paper, we propose an Internet-of-Things (IoT)-based non-intrusive energy wastage monitoring system for efficient energy wastage monitoring in modern building units. The human presence in a room is monitored by using low-cost low-resolution Passive InfraRed (PIR) and thermal sensors. The operating states of Lighting and Heating/Cooling systems are detected by multi-sensor fusion and non-intrusive state monitoring. The sensor data is transmitted to the server by Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) and the energy wastage event can be detected within a short period on the server. We implement an energy efficient operational algorithm along with several power optimizations. We also provide a complete power profile of the node to demonstrate energy efficiency. Experimental results show that the detection accuracy of an electricity wastage event is more than 94%.