Provide Energy Efficiency Monitoring for the Councils – SEEP

Energy efficiency has been established as an infrastructure priority by the Scottish Government. As part of this effort, Scotland’s Energy Efficiency Programme (SEEP) is developing pilot projects for both residential and non-residential properties, with a strong focus on efficient low-carbon heating. For every project developed under the SEEP, each Council must quantify benefits in terms of energy usage, fuel expenses, carbon emissions and the main thermal comfort variables – temperature and humidity.

In the case of the Glasgow Council, monitoring services for these projects will be provided by Logic Energy. Some key requirements for measurement systems used in SEEP pilot projects are web connectivity and remote data retrieval, and the data volumes that must be managed are significant. Monitoring systems by Logic Energy come with these functions built in, making them a solid solution for the needs of this project:

• Logic Energy devices integrate with a smart IoT platform, and all data is backed up continuously using a cloud-based server. This is a significant advantage in projects where data must be gathered from multiple points, such as those developed by the SEEP.

• Stand-alone sensors with batteries and no connectivity are much more vulnerable to data loss. Even though high-end sensors can gather accurate data, its availability cannot be guaranteed if even one sensor suffers damage. Data retrieval also becomes a daunting task without cloud connectivity, especially if there are dozens of sensors involved.

Logic Energy monitoring devices have been deployed successfully in many research and industrial projects, tracking both weather variables and energy inputs. In energy industry applications, our devices have tracked inputs such as electricity, natural gas, heating oil and biomass.

Our platform also offers the flexibility to track monetary savings and avoided emissions, among other variables. Normally, this data only becomes available after rigorous analysis of the data gathered, but the Logic Energy platform can be configured to process information based on live measurements.

• For example, if you deploy a renewable heating system, you can know how much carbon dioxide has been kept off the atmosphere between the day the system started operating and today.

• Under the traditional approach, you only get analysis results at regular intervals – yearly, or perhaps monthly.

Glasgow Council – Pilot Project Overview

• Yoker Housing Association: Internal and external wall insulation

• Linthaugh Nursery School: Insulation and heating upgrade

• Dalmarnock Nursery School: Connection to a recently completed district heating system

• Greater Easterhouse Supporting Hands (GESH): External wall insulation

The Energy Saving Trust (EST) recommend monitoring at least 20% of the total project, which results in 25 properties for the Glasgow Council. The following equipment was specified:

• Energy monitoring units, capable of measuring both heating fuel consumption and electricity consumption, total 25

• Three indoor temperature and humidity sensors per property, total 75

• One outdoor temperature sensor for each site, total 4

Communication and Storage Specifications

A key requirement for the equipment specified is being able to communicate remotely through a web platform, minimizing the hardware needed for the project. In addition, all devices are required to collect data at intervals no longer than 10 minutes, for a period of 16 months, while having the capacity to store at least 32,000 readings for each variable being monitored. Specific requirements for each measurement device were the following:

Monitoring devices by Logic Energy have been deployed successfully for more than 11 years, and this includes data-intensive applications where the instrument readings can change in fractions of a second, such as wind monitoring. Our devices have enough on-site storage space for up to 10 years of data, which can be retrieved remotely via GSM.

Even if you have not checked the data in a long time, it is backed up automatically at 10-minute intervals in the Logic Energy cloud server. This system configuration allows the storage space to be expanded indefinitely, as required for each project.