Determining heat loss

Heat loss in buildings depends on many factors, but the most important is the degree of thermal insulation of the building. The evaluation of the efficiency of thermal insulation can be done through measurements, correlating the variation of temperature inside the building in relation to that outside, for as long as possible a period of time in which the building is not air-conditioned. This can be done conveniently during periods when the building is not inhabited, which requires monitoring the measurements remotely. For this, we chose Lora technology: we used two identical temperature and humidity sensors (RAK1901) and the TTN platform to collect the data and make them available online.

In the TTN platform, an application is created with two "End devices": the first, a thermometer with RAK19003+RAK11300+RAK1901 for measuring the indoor temperature and the second with RAK19007+RAK4631+RAK1901 for measuring the outdoor temperature.

The result of temperature and humidity measurements is displayed in the form of graphs, for each sensor separately and an overlay graph.

The owners of the building were not home and were able to see the temperature evolution on the internet: https://ds-iot.ro/dashboard/view/test-2-dispozite/

The graphs capture the thermal evolution for a day in which the interior was not heated: in this example, within 24 hours, the interior temperature dropped by 2C, at a temperature difference between interior/exterior of 20C.