Initiative
Federico Bari ... Ingenia ... EcoThermo project

Chatting with Rebecca Genesio from Italia CASA about Italian and European innovation for building automation and heating cost allocation (EN)

Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

Chatting with Rebecca Genesio from Italia CASA about Italian and European innovation for building automation and heating cost allocation (EN)

Italia CASA is a magazine for condominium owners, administrators and tenants and it faces also topics about technologies, traditional and innovative ones, available to satisfy modern needs of buildings and their users. In this exhaustive chat with Federico Bari, inventor of the technology on which is based EcoThermo system and co-founder of INGENIA Srl, an I3P startup, several topics are faced around heating cost allocation, the limits of the state of the art technologies beyond the common commercial promises and the future opportunities. The article has been published on the second number of September 2014 of Italia CASA.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/i71ipw66ptngxtk/ITALIA%20CASA%20PAG%2018.pdf?dl=0

ENGLISH TRANSLATION:

The smartphone has become an increasingly integrated tool in the every day life, but some of its potentials are still unexplored. One of these is the possibility, in a short period, to remotely adjust the temperature of the home radiators, measuring the energy consumption in real time and in a reliable and certified way. This is the objective of the European project EcoThermo, started in 2012 and which sees Italy as one of the protagonists, together with other countries such as the UK, Germany, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic. Italia CASA wanted to explore this innovation interviewing the engineer Federico Bari from Ingenia (startup from the incubator of innovative enterprises of the Politecnico di Torino - I3P) who coordinated the project in collaboration with the Politecnico di Torino and INRIM (National Research Institute metrology).

Engineer Bari, what is the contribution that Ingenia gave to the EcoThermo project?

Ingenia was born to design, develop, engineer and produce the EcoThermo system; therefore, it is the soul and the promoter of the whole project. In other words, the company has been established with the clear ambition to provide a system and an innovative technology, now protected by an international approved patent, finalized to go beyond the existing state of the art based on the heating cost allocator devices. To this end, the company had the ability to build around itself a group of Italian excellence about energy saving, automatic controls, wireless transmissions, building/home automation and metrology, i.e. the measurement discipline, involving the Politecnico di Torino with its departments of Energy and Automatic Control and Computer Science, and the National Institute of Metrology Research (INRIM). Finally, INGENIA has been able to attract funds, both private and public, winning two grants, one European and the other regional, for a total of about 2.4 million euro, with which it has come to a stage of pre-industrialization of the system supporting research activities of Politecnico di Torino and validation activities of the new allocation procedure of INRIM.

What are the first results obtained with this system?

Given that the technique based on the heating cost allocators (HCAs) and the laws for their mandatory installation on old centralized heating systems in many European countries and regions have a positive value, because it encourages people to a virtuous heating usage recognizing their savings, this technology, which has more than one century of existence, has clear limits both for metrological issues (accuracy and metrological traceability) and use cases of application (in many contexts they can not be installed). Therefore, the first result of EcoThermo is to provide an allocation technique that come closer to the physical quantities directly involved in the heating exchange, eliminating all the uncertainties of the heating cost allocator devices (not to be confused with heat meters) that, for the absence of alternative, are unsaid to end customers. These ambiguities are not present in the validation climate chamber when the HCA devices are tested in ideal conditions; they emerge in a real application context and can also lead to errors higher than 30% in the worst cases. Anyway, the biggest problem is more subtle: it is difficult or impossible in a real context to perform alternative measures in order to determine the accuracy of each installed HCA; technically, we say that there is no metrological traceability. So, in case of formal complaint by a user, the company that provide the heating cost allocation service can at most claim to have done installation in accordance with the free normative, but it has not alternative reference measurement tools to demonstrate that the HCA service is accurate within the required limits (error not exceeding 5% approximately). At an INRIM hangar it has been built a test environment that we call TFD-MU (ThermalFluidDynamic MockUp) that cost more than 250 000 euro; it is a great centralized heating system, completely naked, instrumented with 300 highly accurate sensors created ad-hoc to compare the EcoThermo allocation technique results with measures taken directly on every radiator with these highly accurate sensors. Furthermore, the TFD-MU has 240 actuators to change the configuration of the hydraulic circuit: in this way we can change the mockup type of distribution, because EcoThermo, on contrary to the HCAs, that can allocate even on fan-coils and floor heating systems, can be also installed on horizontal distributions in addition to the most common vertical distributions. The first results are extremely positive: in many cases we get an accuracy than the expected ones.

What are the technical difference of EcoThermo with respect to the thermostatic valves/heat meters systems?

It should be clarified: EcoThermo does not replace the technique based on heat meters, it replaces the heating cost allocators. The heat meter, which would be the ideal instrument because it measures the three physical quantities directly involved in heating exchange (instant water flow rate, inlet temperature and outlet temperature of the radiator water), cannot be installed in context of centralized heating with vertical distribution circuit. This assumption has led to the success of HCAs, the limits of which descend from the indirect measures that they perform, i.e. they do not consider the physical quantities directly involved in the heating exchange. Consequently, the first difference of EcoThermo consists in making a measurement much closer to that of the heat meter and therefore more accurate and verifiable: an essential thing when it comes to determine how much a user has to pay.

Furthermore, EcoThermo is a real and complete last generation home automation system: it not only collects and send data, it also actuates. It can be controlled remotely by a PC or smartphone. EcoThermo divides access rights depending on the type of user: not only tenants, in fact, but also building managers and heating contractors. It is open to functional expansions: with the Regional grant we extended the building automation capabilities designing wireless remote controlled power plugs, both versions On/Off state or wireless dimmer to modulate the lighting intensity. The real goal of this extension, however, is the home smart grid for remote control of big domestic appliances. The aim? The flattening of main distribution grid power peaks: reduction of peak demand means increased efficiency of production and distribution that can be recognized as cost savings to the end users.

In simple terms, then, what are the advantages for condominiums and families that adopt this system?

There are countless benefits not only for tenants and families. First of all, better accuracy and greater reliability the measure with which to spread the cost of heating. But much has also been done on electronic valves of , for which we would like to deposit a second patent. Generally, in fact, are not proposed valves electronic splitter combined with the heat, but those thermostatic. Because of the way in which these are used latest by tenants, you lose the major fraction of savings achievable energy by lowering the temperature when you are outside the home. The reasons why the electronic ones are installed only in 2% of cases? Electronic valve splitter more cost too much; and the batteries last much less than 3 years promised, often no more than a single winter season. solves these problems: you install only one device for heating, since there is the splitter, and then the results are less invasive, lower costs, less time installation and less maintenance. And the batteries, thanks to a mechanism of energy return, they last about 5 years real. Another advantage is that you do not throw anything away to discharges of Battery: condominiums in fact do not know, but almost all distributors heat must be replaced at the discharge of the batteries. As if to say, the entire system must be purchased again. Not with EcoThermo. Result: with the electronic valves of EcoThermo , finally acceptable for the market, tenants can save up to 2.2 times compared with thermostatic valves, reducing the payback time. And from that moment on the savings is only a gain. Then there are the benefits for the ESCO companies and heating contractors, who can remotely manage the entire plant. For example, the control of boiler efficiency, essential for ESCOs whose energy service contracts is very stringent and with low margins, can be done daily by EcoThermo without moving constantly tech employees by condo to condo. Finally, INGENIA, Politecnico di Torino and INRIM are working on other two research and development topics: a super-system that through the knowledge of the thermal characteristics of the building, the statistical behavior of the users and the local weather forecasts allows pre-emptive politics to get the boiler working near the point of maximum efficiency. And a charging wireless system for the electronic valves, already patented. INGENIA is talking with IREN and Telecom Italia for sharing R&D activities and possibly pilot installations.