Engineering students present a smart energy project

The team — Andrea Núñez, Kevin Ramos, Melissa Ordóñez and Josué Cárcamo, all in Term VII of Systems Engineering — instrumented the laboratory building with twenty-eight consumption and occupancy sensors wired to a hub they built themselves. The system switches nothing off on its own: it records, it models and it proposes.

“The first thing we found was that the problem was not the lighting,” Ordóñez explains. “It was the air conditioning in two rooms, still programmed to a timetable that changed two years ago and that nobody went back to.”

Three months of measurement later, the building's consumption was down 18 % with no building work and no new equipment bought. The saving projected over twelve months covers the cost of the system itself four times over.

The project was submitted as coursework for Capstone Project II and was taken up by the Infrastructure Office, which will extend it to the teaching building during the first term of 2027. The Energy and Sustainability Centre will support the second phase with two research places for undergraduates.

“What we value most is not the percentage,” says Daniel Espinoza, the team's supervisor. “It is that four students learned to measure before giving an opinion. That is the difference between an engineer and somebody who can code.”