Dynamically controlling exterior and interior window coverings through IoT for environmental friendly smart homes

Energy saving using smart home is of paramount importance to reduce heating and cooling energy consumption, and promote sustainable environment. Awnings and blinds have exhibited their effectiveness to reduce heating gain in summer and cooling loss in winter, respectively. Awnings are more effective to reduce heat gain in summer than blinds, while the opposite is true in winter. There exist many approaches in the current literature to remotely control flat curtains and blinds. However, up to our knowledge, no automatic technique is available in the literature, which can dynamically control the orientation of an exterior covering so that it can act like a blind in winter and an awning in summer. In this paper, we propose an automatic on-demand system to control the orientation and size of such exterior covering, and the turning air conditioners, heaters and lights on and off considering the rate of change of room temperature, and its lighting condition. We also discuss the properties and design of such exterior covering. A simulation model was developed to analysis the performance of our approach in terms of energy savings both in summer and winter.