What is energy efficiency?

What is implied by energy efficiency is the total number of planned and applied measures aimed at reducing energy consumption in a certain facility or area, consequently reducing the costs and CO2 emissions, which, today, is one of the most important goals that our planet has at its forefront. Energy efficiency can be achieved at all stages of construction, starting from civil engineering (through the application of high-quality materials, better insulation, etc.), the installation of equipment (energy saving bulbs, pumps with a high coefficient of positive effects, etc.), to introducing automatic control, which is the core field that our company deals with. The optimization of energy usage, i.e. the reduction of work expenses, makes automatic control very appealing to investors, building owners/managers, companies that provide energy services and many others.

How can energy efficiency be improved through automatic control?
Introducing a central system of surveillance and control enables precise control of different elements (valves, lighting intensity, fan speed, etc.) based on the current values of parameters (temperature, presence in the room, presence of daylight, etc.), which would be impossible to achieve merely through manual control. Some of the advantages of automated control are:

• turning off the lighting outside of the official working hours: the lighting is turned off during the late evening and night hours in the rooms where they do not need to work,
• turning off the heating/cooling: heating and cooling in offices and similar rooms is automatically turned off after the end of business hours or in case that the room is empty for a certain amount of time, which can help save a large percentage of energy,
• the preparation of water depending on the outside temperature: the temperature to which the water is heated /cooled for the needs of the facility changes depending on the external conditions, which prevents the unnecessary waste of energy (especially in the transitional period of the year),
• the regulation of valves, shutters, fans, etc.: depending on the external, internal and set parameters, with a precise regulation of the stated elements, the desired value of temperature and air quality in the facility is precisely reached, without the effects of overheating, bad ventilation, etc.

Through the application of the stated measures it is possible
to reduce energy consumption in the facility by 10-30%

The experts of ION Solutions have successfully built, tested and integrated advanced control algorithms in tens of facilities in which the central system for surveillance and control has been implemented. Those algorithms are based on the latest trends in the field of artificial computer intelligence and they are an additional means of improving and controlling subsystems with the aim of increasing energy savings and optimizing control.