Long Term WSN Monitoring for Energy Efficiency in EU Cultural Heritage Buildings

Historic buildings are a distinctive and invaluable characteristic of numerous European cities, and living symbols of Europe’s rich cultural heritage. However, today, EU cultural heritage buildings are contributing huge percentage to the greenhouse gas emissions. This has led to the increasing of wireless sensor network (WSN) deployments aimed at monitoring and improving the energy efficiency of these historic buildings. In this chapter we show a long term, low cost, passive distributed environmental monitoring system that promotes energy-efficient retrofitting in historic buildings. We focus on the design and implementation of an innovative technological framework, and on the hardware and software development of the solution. The presented system provides real-time feedback for the civil engineers for prompt intervention via remote interfaces.