Lahti Energy launched Reiot, a completely new service with the nickname Reijo. The service measures and optimises the living conditions and water and energy consumption in buildings. The easy-to-use user interface and cost-efficient measurement method save both money and the environment.

Digitalisation has transformed property maintenance. Measurement data on conditions such as temperature differences, humidity and ventilation efficiency can be collected quickly, and therefore any faults can be repaired promptly.

Schools, other public buildings, homes and housing companies are all facing problems. Moisture damage may be one reason for the problems, but such damage does not occur overnight.

Moisture damage can be prevented from developing if deviations in the building’s conditions are detected early enough. Problems can rarely be detected by visual observation, which is why it is extremely important to measure the conditions.

Measurement data is obtained immediately

In August 2018, Lahti Energia launched Reiot, which is a completely new service for measuring the conditions in buildings. The service was developed in cooperation with Energy Shift, an affiliated company. Reiot measures the living conditions in buildings and provides the data through one service, which makes the monitoring of building data easy, efficient and reliable. In practice, Reiot provides a notification every time the system detects a deviation. Sensors make it easy to locate and fix problems.

“The biggest benefits include cost savings for property owners, optimised conditions for good building use and living, energy efficiency and the prediction and observation of problems,” lists Juha-Pekka Moisio, Manager, Business Development and Sales for Reiot.

Reiot’s strength is the clever service use: you can monitor building data through a smartphone from your summer cottage or on a desktop computer at the office. The service points out local problems, which enables quick reactions and helps avoid large renovations.

Measurement data can be collected from any data collection device, such as wireless sensors that are connected to a LoRaWAN network measuring, for example, temperature, humidity and air flows.

Information can be obtained quickly once monitoring begins, and logical deviations can be searched based on the data.

“An extremely useful tool for property managers”

Reiot enables connections to new meters and sensors as well as existing measurement equipment. This ensures that service deployment can be take place without major installation work, and measurement data can be compared quickly.

“The simplest deployment in a housing company involves the delivery of sensors to each apartment for installation. Information such as temperature data can be collected from the apartments and thus it can be quickly seen if the heating of apartments needs adjusting,” says Moisio.

Reiot’s largest customer groups include housing companies, major property owners and industrial sites. It takes only a few days to obtain information on the living conditions through measurement sensors installed in the apartments of a housing company. For example, the results may show that the variation in temperatures is five degrees, which means that some apartments are too hot and some too cold.

“Property managers and people responsible for the decision-making in housing companies find this tool very useful: you can see immediately if the building is wasting energy or if the temperature is too high or low and whether the temperatures can be balanced by apartment-specific adjustments. This makes the property manager’s work easier and the housing company can save money.”

Real estate investors, municipalities and businesses are the key customer groups, and they typically have various needs. Issues related to indoor air are common.

“With Reiot, you can monitor, for example, the relative humidity of indoor and outdoor air, which helps detect any early signs of moisture damage. Early problem detection provides clear cost savings.”

In addition, the standardisation of conditions is an important factor in terms of energy savings.

“Major property owners are obligated to report the carbon dioxide emissions and energy consumption of buildings. Manual monitoring is no longer needed when technology is utilised.”

“We see that one important objective is that Reiot would enable the monitoring of conditions, energy efficiency and good living conditions in housing companies as widely as possible. We wanted to create an affordable service that is easy to deploy and that provides efficient help with minor efforts and investments.”

“Cooperation with Digita surpassed expectations”

Reiot uses the IoT network provided by Digita. Initially, the option of building an own network covering the entire Lahti region was also considered, but it was soon decided that cooperation with a large operator already established in the area would be more cost-effective.

According to Moisio, cooperation with Digita exceeded expectations.

“Digita has provided us with a lot of practical help from the selection of measuring devices to tackling coverage problems. We genuinely feel that we have been working together and promoted the project in cooperation. We can be really pleased with that.”

In terms of future visions, Moisio sees that the extensive measurement data provided by Reiot could be made available for various systems in order to optimise the use of the collected data.

“There is already a lot of measurement data, but the challenge is that one optimises water and the other heat. Measurement data cannot yet consider other factors.”