Mobile Building Audits

Critical Need:
Energy efficiency improvements to buildings reduce energy consumption and improve occupant comfort. Building managers use energy audits to identify areas where a building may be losing heat or wasting electricity. However, current audit procedures are costly and imprecise, requiring significant time and labor to complete. New ways to accurately, rapidly, and inexpensively capture energy-relevant data and assemble building energy models could enable building energy managers to better understand sources of energy loss in their buildings and determine the most advantageous retrofits to enable higher energy efficiency.
Project Innovation + Advantages:
Signetron is developing a technology that will enable fast, cost effective, and accurate energy audits without the need for expensive, skilled labor to collect data manually. Signetron’s innovation integrates low-cost visible and infrared optical cameras into a handheld scanner with depth sensing. This enables the operator to capture indoor 3D maps of building geometry and energy-relevant features as they traverse a building. Captured data is uploaded to the cloud where it is analyzed by Signetron software to generate an energy model and provide actionable energy audit information. If successful, this technology will reduce the time and cost associated with today’s energy audits by a factor of 5 and 10 respectively, while offering actionable energy-saving recommendations. This technology could lower the cost barrier for building energy audits, thereby enabling property owners and facility managers to better understand the sources of energy loss in their buildings and where to optimally target retrofits to improve energy savings.
Contact
ARPA-E Program Director:
Dr. Jason Rugolo
Project Contact:
Dr. Avideh Zakhor
Press and General Inquiries Email:
ARPA-E-Comms@hq.doe.gov
Project Contact Email:
avideh.zakhor@signetron.com
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Release Date: