Economical Electricity Home System using Solar

Economical home system can be defined as one realization of home that have a cost-effective ideal by using specific set of technologies combined with the renewable energy as a power supply. This system has a highly advance for lighting, temperature control, socket and own power supply by using solar panel. This system is developed in this project and focused on B40 community that represents the bottom 40% of income earners and also this project becomes suitable for this community for getting an energy efficiency system. Due to the COVID-19, B40 households were reported to have lost their jobs causing financial hardship and had to face the issue of high electricity bills which are very burdensome for them at all in order to pay the cost electricity for monthly. The aim of the article is to design and simulate the solar power system including battery storage in suitable software for a residential house especially in B40 community home and also to analyze the potential of battery storage in order to store the energy from solar panel. Therefore, the economical electricity home system using solar energy for B40 community is proposed in this project for producing an energy efficient system at home. In addition, an electrical floor plan and floor plan of B40 community home is designed in the SketchUp software that using basic electrical equipment such as lighting, ceiling fan and socket. The system is developed by using the MATLAB software in order to produce the result of energy efficiency by using the renewable energy which is solar system and also battery storage. According to the data produced from the calculation of old bills and new bills, the energy consumptions are calculated and also be compared before and after using the renewable energy which is using solar system. The data obtained through calculation of maximum demand in new bill is used in the simulation of solar system in MATLAB software. The results obtained show that after using an energy-efficient load, the monthly new bill is around RM 27.79 which is around RM 10.75 less than the monthly old bill before using an energy-efficient load. It can be concluded that the use of renewable energy in B40 community home can save the energy and also money.

Constructing Floor Plan through Smoke Using Ultra Wideband Radar

Floor plan construction has been one of the key techniques in many important applications such as indoor navigation, location-based services, and emergency rescue. Existing floor plan construction methods require expensive dedicated hardware (e.g., Lidar or depth camera), and may not work in low-visibility environments (e.g., smoke, fog or dust). In this paper, we develop a low-cost Ultra Wideband (UWB)-based system (named UWBMap) that is mounted on a mobile robot platform to construct floor plan through smoke. UWBMap leverages on low-cost and off-the-shelf UWB radar, and it is able to construct an indoor map with an accuracy comparable to Lidar (i.e., the state-of-the-art). The underpinning technique is to take advantage of the mobility of radar to form virtual antennas and gather spatial information of a target. UWBMap also eliminates both robot motion noise and environmental noise to enhance weak reflection from small objects for the robust construction process. In addition, we overcome the limited view of single radar by combining multi-view from multiple radars. Extensive experiments in different indoor environments show that UWBMap achieves a map construction with a median error of 11 cm and a 90-percentile error of 26 cm, and it operates effectively in indoor scenarios with glass wall and dense smoke.

Automatic Extraction of Indoor Spatial Information from Floor Plan Image: A Patch-Based Deep Learning Methodology Application on Large-Scale Complex Buildings

Automatic floor plan analysis has gained increased attention in recent research. However, numerous studies related to this area are mainly experiments conducted with a simplified floor plan dataset with low resolution and a small housing scale due to the suitability for a data-driven model. For practical use, it is necessary to focus more on large-scale complex buildings to utilize indoor structures, such as reconstructing multi-use buildings for indoor navigation. This study aimed to build a framework using CNN (Convolution Neural Networks) for analyzing a floor plan with various scales of complex buildings. By dividing a floor plan into a set of normalized patches, the framework enables the proposed CNN model to process varied scale or high-resolution inputs, which is a barrier for existing methods. The model detected building objects per patch and assembled them into one result by multiplying the corresponding translation matrix. Finally, the detected building objects were vectorized, considering their compatibility in 3D modeling. As a result, our framework exhibited similar performance in detection rate (87.77%) and recognition accuracy (85.53%) to that of existing studies, despite the complexity of the data used. Through our study, the practical aspects of automatic floor plan analysis can be expanded.

AN EVALUATION OF HOUSING FLEXIBILITY AFTER SEVEN YEARS OF HABITATION: IBA HAMBURG 2013

Flexibility in housing has been used for a long time to meet the changing needs of inhabitants. After a century of vicissitude, flexibility became a means for architects to deal with social changes in the new millennium. The International Building Exhibition (IBA) 2013, which took place in Hamburg, Germany, is an example of how the concept of flexibility is being adopted. Housing, in particular, the post-occupancy phase, has not been studied, despite the urban-level aspects of the IBA Hamburg having been extensively written about. Seven years after its construction, nothing is known about what happened regarding these new approaches. The purpose of this study is to investigate the number of households in the IBA Hamburg housing projects that have used the promoted concept of flexibility, particularly in the “Building Exhibition within the Building Exhibition.” As a result, this article aims to shed light on this issue by presenting data from a field survey regarding whether floor plan flexibility was used, and if so, to what extent and what were the reasons. As a result, the author utilized an administered and self-administered open and closed-ended survey questionnaire research approach to collect necessary data for the execution of this investigation. The survey was conducted in twenty-two apartments, with four residential buildings chosen as a case selection for this investigation. The results of this study revealed that, despite being considered during the initial planning phase, flexibility was not commonly applied in the housing projects of IBA Hamburg 2013. Furthermore, the findings reveal that the extent of use of flexibility in these case studies is closely linked with the occupation status of the inhabitants.

North Nias Traditional Round House

North Nias’ traditional house is the only oval-shaped traditional house in the whole world. The oval floor plan that is not commonly found in other traditional buildings is analyzed based on anthropological (non-physical) and functional (physical) backgrounds of North Nias and other community groups in various regions whose traditional house forms resemble, which aims to compare and find similarities between them. The method used in this research is comparative, which is a type of descriptive research that aims to find a fundamental answer about cause and effect by analyzing the factors that cause a particular phenomenon. It was found that the process of forming an oval floor plan in a traditional house in North Nias was caused by several factors, including the functional aspect of North Nias community requiring a large oval-shaped space to gather among villagers, and also as a war strategy wherein an oval room, it is easier to observe around the building. From the anthropological aspect, the use of oval shape is related to the belief of the North Nias community. The benefit of this research is to add insight and public references about the use of architectural forms that are not commonly applied.

Towards Robust Object Detection in Floor Plan Images: A Data Augmentation Approach

Object detection is one of the most critical tasks in the field of Computer vision. This task comprises identifying and localizing an object in the image. Architectural floor plans represent the layout of buildings and apartments. The floor plans consist of walls, windows, stairs, and other furniture objects. While recognizing floor plan objects is straightforward for humans, automatically processing floor plans and recognizing objects is challenging. In this work, we investigate the performance of the recently introduced Cascade Mask R-CNN network to solve object detection in floor plan images. Furthermore, we experimentally establish that deformable convolution works better than conventional convolutions in the proposed framework. Prior datasets for object detection in floor plan images are either publicly unavailable or contain few samples. We introduce SFPI, a novel synthetic floor plan dataset consisting of 10,000 images to address this issue. Our proposed method conveniently exceeds the previous state-of-the-art results on the SESYD dataset with an mAP of 98.1%. Moreover, it sets impressive baseline results on our novel SFPI dataset with an mAP of 99.8%. We believe that introducing the modern dataset enables the researcher to enhance the research in this domain.

Correlation between military and domestic architecture: A tribune's house in Aquincum and its place in Roman architecture

The House of the Tribunus Laticlavius, a large building in the legionary fortress of Aquincum, has only been partially excavated, and this was in the 1970s. This short paper makes an attempt to understand its function and find its place in Roman architecture through a reconstruction of its floor plan and comparison with other prominent residential buildings of the period which share similar features. It appears very likely that the house is based on a loose adaptation of a Hellenistic model, tailored to the needs of high-ranking officers of the Roman army.

Factors Influencing the Sustainability of Wood-Based Constructions’ Use from the Perspective of Users

Traditional construction solutions face increasing competition from more ecological materials such as construction systems based on wood. Thanks to the numerous favourable properties of wood, wood construction enjoys great popularity and allows building economical and modern constructions that are durable and contribute to an ecological future. This study is motivated by the need for innovative solutions in construction and offers numerous findings based on examining actual constructions based on wood. By examining the interactions among selected factors of constructions and their users, the study reacts to the global challenges that call for increased efficiency and sustainability in construction. The examination of the interactions among the selected factors offers more extensive knowledge in the field of constructions based on wood and points towards possible innovative approaches for more sustainable housing and for a more efficient construction industry. The analyses showed that the key aspects that determine the sustainability of housing from the perspective of users are the standard of construction workmanship and construction time, which depend on the choice of construction system, cost-efficiency of use, and material composition and floor plan design. These aspects also interacted with other technical and design aspects, which also played an important role in the perception of housing sustainability.

An investigation of the effects of large houses on occupant behaviour and resource-use in New Zealand

<p>According to Statistics New Zealand the average size of new New Zealand houses almost doubled from 1974‐2011 at the same time that occupancy reduced, meaning fewer people live in larger houses. Features of large houses are extra bedrooms, specialised rooms (e.g. study, media room), more than one living space, several bathrooms (including en‐suites), and double/triple garages. This contrasts with what is defined in this thesis as the “core house”, which is a house (or part of a house) consisting of a living room, a dining room, a kitchen, and a bedroom for each occupant (assuming couples share a bedroom). Based on this, houses with more space than the appropriate core house for each household are considered as living in some level of large housing. Living in larger houses than necessary means use of more natural resources in terms of construction materials, operating energy and the additional furniture and appliances needed. This study, therefore, aimed to measure resource‐use efficiency in different sized houses and rooms found in NZ houses to show the significance of human decisions on housing energy use. To do this, it used a life‐cycle energy approach to measure resource‐use and reveal the long term environmental impact of house size decision. A 100 year cycle was used to cover typical human lifespan. Using grounded theory, the research developed into four studies: 1‐ An observation of the features of New Zealand houses: Houses advertised for sale in TradeMe website were studied to show the features of New Zealand houses and types of furniture and appliances people keep in their houses. 2‐ Study 1: Based on the observation study, a questionnaire was prepared for a pilot study of 7 households living in small and large houses asking about occupants, type/number of rooms and types/number/location of furniture/appliances in their house. Each occupant also reported where he/she spend his/her time at home indoor for 14 consecutive days. This study revealed any problems with the preliminary questionnaire and also set strategy for the large time‐use survey. 3‐ Study 2: Based on the results of study 1, an online questionnaire based survey was undertaken by families with 4 or fewer members living in NZ owner‐occupied houses. The questionnaire asked for information about family members, type/number of spaces in their home, furniture and its location and the time spent in each room of the house, outdoors, and out of home by each occupant over one day. This survey provided a reliable data set about the features of New Zealand owner‐occupied houses and their occupants, the type an number of furniture items, appliances and tools in them and where/for how long each household member spent his/her daily time in the house. 4‐ Floor plan study: To get a better understanding of the size of rooms in NZ houses, a floor plan study of 287 houses was performed. Floor plans were redrawn in AutoCAD and the floor area of each room and the whole house were extracted for mapping with house size in SPSS. Results of the time‐use study indicate New Zealanders on average spend 15.94 hours/day at home indoor and house size does not affect this. On average 54.7% of this is spent in usual bedrooms, 29.9% in the usual living room, dining room and kitchen, and use of other rooms including bathrooms accounts for 15.4% of time at home indoors. Using a life cycle analysis approach, selecting to live in a house with 3 extra rooms, a single person, couple, couple with one child and couple with two children will use 66%, 66%, 75% and 66% more energy for housing over 100 years. By combining time‐use and energy use results, a sample person living in a house with no extra rooms for their whole life will have a housing energy of 1.59GJ/hour which increases to 2.68GJ/hour by living in a house with 3 extra rooms. Based on resources for construction, refurbishment and heating and the time occupants spend in each room over the life the house, for each hour of using a master bedroom New Zealanders use 0.9MJ, and this increases to 9.3MJ for an hour of using a study and 5.1MJ for a play room. This research suggests more public awareness is needed regarding the role of human behaviour in achieving a sustainable architecture and perhaps it is time for governments to control use of natural resources by restricting house sizes where applicable.</p>

An investigation of the effects of large houses on occupant behaviour and resource-use in New Zealand

<p>According to Statistics New Zealand the average size of new New Zealand houses almost doubled from 1974‐2011 at the same time that occupancy reduced, meaning fewer people live in larger houses. Features of large houses are extra bedrooms, specialised rooms (e.g. study, media room), more than one living space, several bathrooms (including en‐suites), and double/triple garages. This contrasts with what is defined in this thesis as the “core house”, which is a house (or part of a house) consisting of a living room, a dining room, a kitchen, and a bedroom for each occupant (assuming couples share a bedroom). Based on this, houses with more space than the appropriate core house for each household are considered as living in some level of large housing. Living in larger houses than necessary means use of more natural resources in terms of construction materials, operating energy and the additional furniture and appliances needed. This study, therefore, aimed to measure resource‐use efficiency in different sized houses and rooms found in NZ houses to show the significance of human decisions on housing energy use. To do this, it used a life‐cycle energy approach to measure resource‐use and reveal the long term environmental impact of house size decision. A 100 year cycle was used to cover typical human lifespan. Using grounded theory, the research developed into four studies: 1‐ An observation of the features of New Zealand houses: Houses advertised for sale in TradeMe website were studied to show the features of New Zealand houses and types of furniture and appliances people keep in their houses. 2‐ Study 1: Based on the observation study, a questionnaire was prepared for a pilot study of 7 households living in small and large houses asking about occupants, type/number of rooms and types/number/location of furniture/appliances in their house. Each occupant also reported where he/she spend his/her time at home indoor for 14 consecutive days. This study revealed any problems with the preliminary questionnaire and also set strategy for the large time‐use survey. 3‐ Study 2: Based on the results of study 1, an online questionnaire based survey was undertaken by families with 4 or fewer members living in NZ owner‐occupied houses. The questionnaire asked for information about family members, type/number of spaces in their home, furniture and its location and the time spent in each room of the house, outdoors, and out of home by each occupant over one day. This survey provided a reliable data set about the features of New Zealand owner‐occupied houses and their occupants, the type an number of furniture items, appliances and tools in them and where/for how long each household member spent his/her daily time in the house. 4‐ Floor plan study: To get a better understanding of the size of rooms in NZ houses, a floor plan study of 287 houses was performed. Floor plans were redrawn in AutoCAD and the floor area of each room and the whole house were extracted for mapping with house size in SPSS. Results of the time‐use study indicate New Zealanders on average spend 15.94 hours/day at home indoor and house size does not affect this. On average 54.7% of this is spent in usual bedrooms, 29.9% in the usual living room, dining room and kitchen, and use of other rooms including bathrooms accounts for 15.4% of time at home indoors. Using a life cycle analysis approach, selecting to live in a house with 3 extra rooms, a single person, couple, couple with one child and couple with two children will use 66%, 66%, 75% and 66% more energy for housing over 100 years. By combining time‐use and energy use results, a sample person living in a house with no extra rooms for their whole life will have a housing energy of 1.59GJ/hour which increases to 2.68GJ/hour by living in a house with 3 extra rooms. Based on resources for construction, refurbishment and heating and the time occupants spend in each room over the life the house, for each hour of using a master bedroom New Zealanders use 0.9MJ, and this increases to 9.3MJ for an hour of using a study and 5.1MJ for a play room. This research suggests more public awareness is needed regarding the role of human behaviour in achieving a sustainable architecture and perhaps it is time for governments to control use of natural resources by restricting house sizes where applicable.</p>