The city of Helsinki owns about 1200 public buildings including 200 schools, 350 kindergardens, 7 hospitals, office buildings and libraries. For several decades the city of Helsinki has done a great effort to save energy and to achieve better energy efficiency in the buildings.

The Helsinki pilot for the SAVE ENERGY project consists of two schools, owned by the municipality, which represent different levels of required activities and investments:

• Ala-Malmi school: built in 1965, with an area of 7000 square meters in three buildings, 300 pupils and 50 teachers.
• The Pihkapuisto Lower level School: built in 1989 with a total area of 5100 square meters in a single building, 220 pupils and 25 teachers.
  

  Pihkapuisto school and pupils playing on the school yard.

The key objective in Helsinki pilot schools is to improve energy efficiency of the buildings through the behaviour transformation of pupils, teachers and staff people with the support of the leading edge ICT systems, including real time informations displays and Serious Games. Based on the results achieved at these schools, it is planned to roll out technologies, methodologies and best practices to other schools and public buildings. The energy performance of schools will be improved by demonstrating how intelligent ICT solutions could be used to control the energy costs according to the actual use of the building as well as by motivating the different users (teachers, pupils, technical support personnel, etc.).

The key objectives will be reached:

• by creating greater awareness among the users on the impact of their actions within the building both through better utilization of the existing monitoring and through enabling access to new energy consumption displays with more continuous (or real-time) data
• by demonstrating the impact of selected cost-effective energy efficiency improvements with technical solution that integrates partial IT-solutions and control and management tools (e.g. remote measurement and monitoring through wireless temperature, humidity, occupancy & daylight sensors and controls that are integrated with Building Energy Management System)
• by empowering the users to participate in the energy management of the building e.g. as through advice and experience sharing on energy saving measures on social media networks.

Classroom in Helsinki pilot building

Applying Living Lab methodologies, namely energy audits followed by continous discussions with the users and technical experts, different areas with potential for energy savings have been identified in the schools: lighting and energy consumption in the classrooms, equipments during kitchen operations and usage of computers in computer science classrooms just to name a few. All these have a high impact on the overall energy consumption.

Helsinki Technical Solution

The Helsinki pilot technical solution is based on an integated solution using sensing equipment from Kyab, and wireless and networking equipment from Dunkkis and Meshworks. The virtual server located in Metropolia UAS collects all measurements data from both schools:

• Energy (heat, electricity and water) consumption and some HVAC measurements from the existing Building Management Systems
• Intelligent wireless sensor networks (each including 17 sensor modules) measuring temperature, moisture, luminance and CO2. Furthermore all main electricity consumptions are measured with total of 73 measurement points.
• Wireless sensors from Dunkkis gateways using the public ASUS routers are used at the gyms.

System architechture diagram

The system is using local LCD displays to generate sophisticated, still user-friendly information displays targeting the different user groups in real time. Additionally, local server located at Metropolia UAS forwards the validated information into the ISA central server to be consumed by the end-user services, namely Serious Games.