ACDoctor: Air Conditioner Diagnostic Tool Using Sensor Networks

ACDoctor is the implementation of Sensor Networks application for monitoring Air Conditioning (AC) system. ACDoctor was proposed due to the fact that AC system consume about 60% of building's electrical power consumptions. In order to save the energy consumption, an AC diagnostic tool is proposed. The intended specifications of ACDoctor are to monitor the AC performance and detect its problems without having to deal with the AC technically. In our system, sensors will be integrated to collect the measurement data from the AC and the room environment. Sensor Networks with Zigbee and RS485 protocol will serve as the media communication between the sensors and the gateway. For the user interface, an Android Application will be provided to collect and calculate the measurement data that is stored in an online database. To estimate the performance of the AC, a new metric called the Performance Coefficient is proposed. A sleep scheme that could reduce the current consumption of ACDoctor will also be introduced in this paper. The testing results of ACDoctor show that ACDoctor is capable of estimating AC performance and diagnosing up to six different AC issues accurately.