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Comment by scrappyjoe | Hacker News Reader

Have you looked into IoT systems control? Things like temp monitoring feeding into A/C draw, electricity off when people leave etc? Utilization of space is,one consideration, but a major other factor is maintenance, which comes down to optimizing running costs and minimizing wear through preventative maintenance and proactive design - IoT has a lot of potential in that space.

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Great question - we believe there are a lot of potential add-on modules, especially around building control. One that is gaining a lot of interest recently is using people-counting data to more precisely control HVAC systems (most systems today rely on simple motion sensing for control).

Modulating heating / cooling based on the exact count can help cut energy consumption, sometimes by as much as 30% for commercial buildings.

ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects Agency) recently put out a proposal for such a system - you can read more here if you're interested:

https://arpa-e-foa.energy.gov/

I was talking with a maintenance supervisor for a large facility and he was saying that they were able to modify the amount of make-up outside air cycled into a facility based on occupation (think O2 depletion, lol). Is that something you folks have run into? Seems like if you could avoid exhausting a couple (hundred?) thousand cubic feet of cooled air per hour, you could save a good bit of money.

I did some work with a simple energy management system for a large retailer that had 4800 stores. The amount of money that can be saved with simple things like delaying HVAC start at open based on ambient temps, or using sunrise calculations to know when to turn on/off lighting is pretty ridiculous.

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