Long term, low cost, passive environmental monitoring of heritage buildings for energy efficiency retrofitting

Monitoring the structural health and the local climate of historical heritage buildings may be a hard task for civil engineers for assessing the energy efficiency of the environment, due to the lack of a pre-existing monitoring model, and due to the presence of deployments with strict installation constraints. This paper reports on the experience gathered during an European Project (3ENCULT Project - Efficient Energy for EU Cultural Heritage) regarding the design and implementation of an innovative technological network for monitoring heritage buildings. We present hardware and software solution developed to efficiently satisfy the requirements for long-term monitoring of a historical building, called `Palazzina della Viola', and located in the centre of Bologna, Italy. The presented system provides real-time feedback to civil engineers which can retrieve sensed data using remote interfaces. Based on 7 months of operation, we show that the proposed solution, compared with other standard monitoring systems, is an effective low-cost alternative testing tool for assessing the environmental monitoring in heritage buildings. The system allows a reliable data transfer and we estimated the lifetime beyond two years.