HEAT METERING SYSTEM
One of the most important player of the hydronic solutions assigned us the design of their heat metering system.
This project is made by several devices: many of them are battery powered and communicate with the other through the wireless RF868 MHz standard. All the collected information can be accessed by the system supervisor using the GSM technology.
The system can be configured in a scalar way with different combination of the following devices:
Heat metering unit
The heat metering unit is a battery power device (which have to ensure the operation of the device for more than ten years) mounted directly on each single radiator of the entire building. This device is responsible to calculate the heat energy consumption of the radiator. There are three different models of heat metering unit
- with local temperature sensor for the radiator
- with local/external temperature sensor for the environment
- with/without radiator water flow sensor.
This device uses the information of the resources just mentioned to execute a direct/indirect calculation algorithm which determines the heat energy consumption in a certain moment and accumulated over the time.
Each unit can be considered as a single node of a RF network subgroup which is managed directly by a device called repeater which collects the info related to energy consumption, temperatures, diagnostics and device status of more heat metering units composing the RF network subgroup itself. A proprietary RF 868Mhz based communication protocol is adopted to manage the communication between the repeater and the heat metering units of the generic system subgroup.
Repeater
The repeater devices is responsible to collect all the info coming from different heat metering units joined in logic subgroups based on different criteria/needs (i.e group of heat metering units of the same floor of a certain building…).
More repeater devices can realize different RF network subgroups collecting the information of all the heat metering units of the entire acquisition system. As already mentioned, a proprietary RF 868Mhz communication protocol has been implemented to control the data transferring between the heat metering devices and each repeater. A smart arbitration mechanism based on a self-learning approach is adopted to manage the interaction of each single repeater with data received by devices belonging to subgroups controlled by other repeaters.
Concentrator
The heat metering unit is a battery power device (which have to ensure the operation of the device for more than ten years) mounted directly on each single radiator of the entire building. This device is responsible to calculate the heat energy consumption of the radiator. There are three different models of heat metering unit
- with local temperature sensor for the radiator
- with local/external temperature sensor for the environment
- with/without radiator water flow sensor.
This device uses the information of the resources just mentioned to execute a direct/indirect calculation algorithm which determines the heat energy consumption in a certain moment and accumulated over the time.
Each unit can be considered as a single node of a RF network subgroup which is managed directly by a device called repeater which collects the info related to energy consumption, temperatures, diagnostics and device status of more heat metering units composing the RF network subgroup itself. A proprietary RF 868Mhz based communication protocol is adopted to manage the communication between the repeater and the heat metering units of the generic system subgroup.
The concentrator is the device which is responsible to collect the information coming from each repeater of the acquisition system using the RF 868Mhz proprietary communication protocol. It can manage also data coming directly from an its own RF network subgroup of heat metering unit devices. This can be useful to realize simple small acquisition systems where the concentrator itself is capable to reach all the heat measuring units without adopting any repeaters.
The data collected can be accessed remotely by the heat metering system handler through another dedicated proprietary RF 868Mhz communication protocol or alternatively through a GSM connection. Alternatively, the concentrator supports also a standard USB interface to support direct data downloading on a standard USB flash disk drive device in text file format.
Usb rf key
This adapter can be used with a dedicated application running on a personal computer as an interface to get the concentrator data information using a dedicated proprietary RF 868Mhz communication protocol.
All the system was internally designed and we have produced more than 1.7 million of pcs of the Heat Metering Unit in about 4 years of production.
