Microclimate Control - The idea

The primary problem that I see with climate control is that it isn’t very targeted. One of the nice things about Nest is that it sets the temperature of the house to change with what people require, e.g., turn off the AC when people aren’t there.  Nest allows time targeting for climate control, but it still is at the granularity of a household (or at least the climate control system).

Microclimate control would have a main wall controller like Nest, but it would also come with a set of two other things. The first would be a set of wirelessly-controlled AC/heat vents. These would replace the normal vents and could be opened and closed by the Microclimate controller. The vents would be wireless and come with a long lasting battery. The last part would be room controllers. These would look like smaller versions of the main controller, but they would have a suite of sensors to detect what’s going on in the room. A combination of a temperature sensor, light sensor, IR sensor, and a sonar sensor could determine if the lights are on, warm things (people) are in the room, and if there is movement in the room. These inputs would help the system to learn when people want the house at different temperatures.

Let me walk through a few scenarios. During the winter at night, you may want the bedrooms warm but the rest of the house can stay cool. The user would turn the main controller down and the ones in the bedrooms up. The sensor data could be used to model what the room looks like when people want it cooler or warmer than the rest of the house (such as when people are in the room). Once the models are well-trained, the heating system could respond to unusual events like someone getting up in the middle of the night.  The heat would be automatically turned up in the other rooms where the sleepless person spends time until they go back to bed.

One small point is that the system would have to learn the relationship between the different wireless vents and the room controllers. If there isn’t an exact one-to-one ratio, then this relationship could be a complex. For example, it may be necessary to run the vent in a room next to the one you want to heat if there isn’t a vent in the room with the controller.