We are witnessing the beginning of the IoT revolution. We use smartphones, numerous gadgets and sensors in our everyday life, providing us with unimaginable information, insights and benefits. We have smart phones, smart wearables, smart cars, smart almost everything; yet buildings remain “dumb” especially in reference to energy efficiency. Enterprises today more than ever require detailed monitoring and control of their buildings energy usage in their attempt to optimize energy efficiency and meet specified efficiency standards. However, traditional approaches (by large OEMs) most often do not make economic sense, especially for small enterprises, as overall cost often surpasses even medium-to-long term potential energy savings, while also do not provide future proof solutions and lock in clients in their product range. Consequently in the EU and US, market penetration of BEMS in commercial buildings is only 0.2% We consider this an important business opportunity which can be addressed with a cost-efficient fully open-source approach, transforming the way traditional BEMS technology is installed and used, but also changing the business model of the BEMS industry from CAPEX-intense & licence based to a reasonable subscription/services OPEX model. We envision an open-source BEMS that can become “wordpress for buildings” and develop an ecosystem around it of small companies / freelancers who will deploy and maintain it for their customers.
Our Building Energy Monitoring System is based on a popular smart-home/IoT integration platform known as OpenHab which is developed in Java/OSGi technology and is designed to be absolutely vendor-neutral as well as hardware/protocol agnostic. We have developed additional modules (bindings) in order to extent the functionality of OpenHab towards a Building Energy Monitoring System. Please visit our Wiki for more details.
All open source and open hardware projects can be found at https://github.com/ellak-monades-aristeias