Decrepit Building Monitoring Solution for Zero Energy Building Management Using PLC and Android Application

Abstract

Since power line communication (PLC) technology has been considered a platform technology for smart metering, this study introduces an analogous system technology for the PLC-based monitoring systems in zero energy building management. This technology allows a system operator or an operation center to monitor, calculate, or manage power use remotely through the existing power line so that individual suppliers will be able to grasp the present condition of power use and respond to any unexpected incidents. As in any country, many old buildings in Korea are repaired to be used for 40–50 years or even longer since constructing new ones is expensive. Because remodeling old buildings is not only expensive but also generates construction waste, repairing is the preferred alternative in many cases. With the expectation that the proposed platform technology will be one of the promising technologies for sustainable building, its uninterrupted power usage monitoring and remote power control/management functions will be quite useful for economizing power with convenience. A system with such a PLC-based design and algorithm can be quite scalable as well. As the major contribution of this study, a solution suitable for decrepit buildings or apartments has been developed by using the PLC technology, and the test bed experiment was conducted for it. The result showed that the solution worked flexibly and efficiently. Since it is impossible to install a new network especially in the case of decrepit buildings, PLC must be used through the existing power line. Thus, a decrepit building monitoring system has been proposed in this study for a sustainable building. The proposed solution was simulated with OPNET simulation first. Following the mounting of the actual PLC product and development of a monitoring application to complete the platform/solution, it is being tested at the test bed in a decrepit building.