District heating network

A district heating network can be monitored with battery-powered sensors that record pressure and temperature at the measuring points and send them by radio to a platform. With LoRaWAN or mioty, measuring points no longer need individual cabling. On the platform, network operators see all measuring points, set limit values and receive alarms when values deviate. Until now, every single pressure reading required a technician to climb into a shaft, secured by a second employee.

Pressure drops indicate damage and losses in the network and therefore need to be detected quickly. A single manual reading, however, does not show whether pressure has dropped suddenly or over a longer period. With steel jacket pipes, annular space pressure also matters: a vacuum between the carrier pipe and the jacket pipe provides insulation. If air enters, the insulation effect can drop to a tenth, and heat losses and costs rise.

Flow and return temperatures show how much heat is lost along the pipe and whether supply reaches its destination. The Kögelhof biogas farm measures temperatures both at the feed-in point on the farm and at the school in Mochenwangen, which is supplied via a 1.5-kilometre pipe. The ifm io-key sends the values via the cellular network to the moneo platform, so temperature fluctuations are noticed before the classroom gets cold.

Yes, meter data from a district heating network can be brought together and analysed centrally in an IoT platform. The network company of Stadtwerke Krefeld monitors its district heating network with 1,500 meters on ThingsBoard. On the same platform, the utility offers energy monitoring to its business customers and measures groundwater levels. Network monitoring and energy management thus run in one system rather than in separate applications.