Energy Loss Monitoring and Intervention System for Public Buildings

Context

Public buildings run on fixed schedules that rarely match how they are actually used. Corridors stay lit when nobody walks them. Heating keeps running in rooms that emptied an hour ago. Warm air leaves through parts of the envelope nobody has checked in years. Each of these is small on its own. Together they are a large and continuous cost.

The harder problem is not that the loss exists. It is that the loss is invisible while it is happening. For most public buildings, the only energy signal that reaches anyone with authority is the monthly bill. A bill is a summary. By the time it arrives, the moment when the waste could have been stopped has already passed several thousand times.

This project starts at that gap — the distance between the point where energy is lost and the point where someone finds out.

Approach

The decision that shapes everything else is that reporting is not the deliverable. A system that only measures produces a number, and a number still needs a person to read it, understand it and act on it. In a public building that chain breaks reliably: the person who sees the data is usually not the person who can change the setting.

So the system was scoped to close the loop itself. Measure where the loss occurs rather than only at the main meter, decide locally whether the current state is wasteful, then intervene.

What I built

A working prototype of that loop, in three layers.

• Sensing. Measurement placed at loss points inside the building rather than at the incoming supply, so that a reading maps to a location and a cause instead of to a total.
• Logging and evaluation. Readings recorded continuously and compared against the expected state of that space. This comparison is what turns a raw value into “this is a loss”.
• Intervention. An output path that changes the condition instead of only recording it, so a detected loss ends rather than accumulates.

The prototype was developed for the TEKNOFEST Environment and Energy Technologies Competition and reached the finals. The underlying invention is registered with Türk Patent ve Marka Kurumu as TR 2025 014583 B.

What I learned

Two things stayed with me.

First, the value of a measurement is set by what can act on it. Adding another sensor is easy. Adding a sensor that changes a decision is not. Most of the design work turned out to be deciding what not to measure.

Second, a device for a public building is not only an engineering object. It has to survive being installed by someone who did not build it, in a building nobody will renovate for it, and it has to keep working when no one is paying attention. That constraint removed more ideas than any technical limit did.

Note: this entry is a structural placeholder. The competition record is accurate; the technical write-up still needs the owner’s own detail.