Author(s) :

Habibu Rabiu.

Volume/Issue :

Abstract :

Electrical energy consumption in public offices is dominantly caused by air-conditioning loads (AC). In the past, several energy reduction strategies were proposed to lower the cooling cost, which include employing alternative building materials, using variable speed compressors, etc. One fundamental problem that results in heavy cost in term of energy consumption of AC is the poor user behaviour. It is a common practice in Government offices to have ACs left working for hours while the office occupants are not in or have even close for the day. To ensure energy supply security, this paper proposed to employ passive infrared sensor (PIR) and microcontroller to keep up scanning the offices space at a top speed to monitor the presence of staff. It shuts down the AC if it did not detect any movement after the elapse of a present period. To evaluate the effectiveness of the new method, we employ an ethnography approach. Results got show a significant energy saving, which sometimes reaches up to saving of 15hours of wasted energy per day.

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