A practical case study of HVAC control with MET measuring in HEMS environment

As a peak-cut or peak leveling control, heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) are essential method for controlling the demand of electric power consumption. However, it is important to consider environmental amenity when designing control systems because the control may cause the deterioration of the amenity. In existing methods, metabolic equivalent (MET) values are not considered. Measurement and processing of MET values can be costly, requiring special infrastructure to both measure the values and communicate these values with a home energy management system (HEMS) or building energy management system (BEMS). This paper proposes a HVAC control method that considers the tradeoff between environmental amenity and energy conservation using the Keio University network oriented intelligent and versatile energy management system (KNIVES). The proposed method uses an iPod touch or iPhone application to obtain accurate measurements of both the MET value and the predicted mean vote (PMV). The accuracy of the PMV values after incorporation of MET estimates was confirmed experimentally. A HEMS experiment was conducted and a reduction in energy consumption was observed, demonstrating the usefulness of both the application and the proposed HVAC control method.