*34C3 preroll music*
Herald: Welcome everybody to our next talk “Nabovarme open source heating
infrastructure in Christiania”. So I would like to know who of you has already been
to Christiania, that little free state in Copenhagen?
That looks like maybe 60% or something like that.
Now, I have good or bad news for you, depending on how you see it.
If you mainly associate Christiania with weed, there will be no mention of weed
in this talk, whatsoever, after my introduction, so tone down the expectations.
But we will have a very interesting talk about neighborhood heating,
that’s what Nabovarme means, I just learned it today. *laughs*
So I would like to introduce our speakers, but they will introduce themselves
in a moment, too. We have Emmerik, Johannes and Kristoffer.
And I would like you to give them a warm round of applause!
*applause*
Emmerik: Okay. Thank you very much for coming here today and
listening to us. I’m Emmerik. Kristoffer: I’m Kristoffer.
Johannes: And I’m Johannes. Emmerik: And I will do the talking;
I was elected to do the talking by these good guys, and
Kristoffer and Johannes will answer questions afterwards and I ask you, please
ask a lot of questions, because I think we have a little extra spare time.
Thank you!
So what is Nabovarme? It’s actually
a distributed central heating system organization thing.
And Nabovarme is a word
for community heating. We have several heating systems developed
by the 14 local areas in Christiania.
The basic of Christiania heating has been pellets
for the last 5 or 10 years. Pellets is
these small things that you saw in the beginning, that you had in the hands,
let’s go back to this, see the pellets, wooden pellets that you burn.
We have a lot of common pellet heating systems inside Christiania,
those are the red dots, the large red dots. And the small orange dots
is local heaters in just one family. And we have lots more
small orange systems than you have seen here, but we didn’t have time
to put them in. The history of heaters.
We tried to find some good pictures of the original Christiania
oil barrel stove. But we couldn’t. It’s difficult,
they’re all gone. They burned through back in the ’70s. So all we have
are these on the left, a very common old stove
from the ’80s. Then we have of course the oil heating system,
number 2 from left, which was common in the ’90s, and still is common
somewhere in Christiania. Then we have the Bekkasin oven, which is
a popular oven in Denmark for wood, for logs, and
you see to the right a typical Christiania installation, which is
just a tube going through the side of the building, and,
you know, burning pellets inside and smoke outside. Not very modern,
not very efficient, and coming to its end.
What we have done is we have taken some very old meters
when we installed… those meters, when we installed some surveillance
and monitoring on the pellet systems that we have.
Now we’re in the phase of combining the users that had these oil heaters,
the wood stoves, the small pellet heaters into larger systems that perform better.
And the central role for improvement is logging the heat usage, and finding ways
of making everyone pay the necessary amount and pay it in time.
The logging system consists of these Multical 602,
that was first. They were very old
when we found them second hand, and then we have improved them with the
switch-mode power supply to the right, in the right picture, and
with a WiFi gadget in connection, so making it into a smart meter.
The billing and the heating on/off is done through our custom made database.
So remote logging makes maintenance much easier and can over time improve the efficiency
of the heating system. That can help the users being more interested in taking part
of the heating consumption problems which is one of our time’s main
global warming issues, you know.
Well, our Nabovarme organizations are organized into the communities.
And in our most modern system every user is using our newly developed
prepaid consumption. You know, before people would go down and buy
some logs of wood. And then would go home and burn them. When the burning ended
they were cold. They felt the cool and they went back, buy more logs, and
heating it, again. So first you buy, then you have the heat. The same model goes
into our prepaid consumption: first you pay for the heat and then you consumpt.
And then when your use is over the valve turns off. That is a very simple model
and it means that there is no deficit nowhere. That means organizing
the receiving money in advance for heat and inserting the equivalent amount
of energy into the system database. When the user has consumed what he’s paid for
the module automatically turns off the valve to the user.
The thing is that Christiania was founded as on top of an old military base
which is actually coming back to 1680s,
when the city of Copenhagen was defending itself against the Swedes, the German
and the English. That data base was left in the 1960s,
and was just empty as you see it on this old photo.
In 2011 the government of Denmark
won a lawsuit against Christiania. That means that the free town was forced
to follow the regulations of Denmark. At the same time Christiania was declared
legal, and that resulted in that the local people in Christiania
wanted to improve their house standards much more
than was used to before. So they put in investments in our infrastructure
and in our houses on a longer time horizon; now we invest up to
30 years in advance, and that’s the whole difference than before, when it was just
for 1 or 2 years people would climb up something.
The whole infrastructure is changing in these years.
Christiania is quite large. It’s 46 years old,
and it has almost 1.000 inhabitants. Actually the 900 that you see here
are the inhabitants that we know of. But there are many people that just live
there, without having a place to stay. That means that they change rooms,
they sleep on sofas, they kind of roam around within the community.
So there may well be a thousand, I don’t know. There are at least 265 houses
and 24 hectares of land.
There is a heating construction.
It’s a very easy kind of.
You burn pellets. That’s it. But when you extend this
to larger systems it can be quite complex.
The pellet burners are difficult to keep in steady production. But they’re cheap
and can be handled by the local users. Special effort has been done
to ensure that the heating system keeps running smoothly all the time by
constantly improving the heaters and the steering units, that’s the left picture.
You see: there are some yellow add-ons on top and bottom
and those are added-on to an existing heating system that we have bought.
We have added air pressure to ensure that the ashes are blown away from the heaters’
surface at regular intervals. And that you can see on the left picture
on the blue tubes. And we’re planning to add scrubbers to clean the flue gas.
That means you have… when the smoke comes out of the chimney
you have a problem with pollution, and we want to take the pollution out of the gas.
And this is yet to come but we’re in the process of doing that as well.
We’re now engaged in improving the logging by the use of the Kamstrup meters
you see in the center top picture and use Raspberry Pi’s as well
to monitor the steering units. That’s the bottom picture.
That’s coming out of a Raspberry Pi. We are fortunate to have
several LANs running inside Christiania. Those we can use
for propagating the samples and monitor them, that’s the right picture here.
So you see all these green points are actually WiFi spots.
A typical Nabovarme installation consists of a heating production center,
some heating consumers, some WiFi infrastructure and a web portal used
for plotting consumption and accounting. Well, the back…
when we started off the Kamstrup solution meters, they were
not very smart, they could actually take care
of the metering of consumers but we in the city lack the ability
to gather these samples for later accounting. So the Kamstrup company
had some solutions for smart metering which supports multiple protocols:
we have the Wireless M-Bus, the Zigbee and many more protocols,
but there was no WiFi. That meant to us that investing
in a new infrastructure for just metering was very costly and unnecessary.
Their solutions required a new infrastructure for propagation and
data gathering and the need for certified electricians to install it.
The Kamstrup solutions also required a subscription plan in order to gain access
to our own data and we did not like that. So,
nowadays, many people in Christiania
have their own WiFi hotspots. Christiania users are willing to open theirs
to the heating meters and that is a way to reduce the costs of having
to manually read the meter, and it’s a way to get through the WiFi
up to our servers.
When researching the existing open source options from the Kamstrup to create
a meter logger we ran across the ESP8266.
That’s a microcontroller and when it first came out it was small and cost effective
enough to be inserted into the meters and it had the WiFi capabilities
to transmit the samples over the existing infrastructure,
that means all the WiFis that you saw, the green points.
Later, thanks to martin-ger’s ESP library we were able to extend the coverage
to places that lacked their own hot spots. That means that we could hop in…
that our meter solution could be like an extra hot spot and transmit all the data
through some of the heaters to the next hot spot, and on to the servers.
We created a daughter board
to be inserted in the Kamstrup meters consisting of the ESP8266
with its flash and WiFi capabilities, some triacs for controlling
the external valve, you know, the valve that can turn off and on for the consumers
and a separate power supply unit to power everything. And this picture that you see
here is put into the living space of the people that are attached to the
Nabovarme system. So everyone has one like this.
We had a problem. Because Kamstrup
had an open source protocol, KMP, but it was very difficult to read it and to
read about it. It didn’t kind of work out, and we had to spend a few months to
reverse-engineer a range of their devices and they are now supported in our meter
logger firmware. And the meter logger firmware
takes care of the net translations for extending the WiFi,
and through a grace period during boot you’re able to set up
a target access point to connect to. That means that
when you first set it up you find the WiFi spots around, and you find the best one,
and you log it into that one. If you later need to change that
you pass along with your own telephone a special code, and then you can change
that point again. That’s a grace period, that’s just
a minute or two, and that’s it. So after that grace period it goes over
to sample mode. The scheduler asks the meter for a sample
every minute. And the KMP – the Kamstrup – requests
talks to the meter over serial, and the KMP receives the data and does
checksum before all floating it to the MQTT.
The MQTT dispatcher takes care of transmitting the sample to the server.
And then other part of the firmware closes the hot water valve if the last sample
resolves in excessive consumption based on the readings from the user’s account.
So this is how we can actually turn off the user, or actually the thing does it
automatically. If there’s no more money on that account
it automatically switches off. Like when you go down and buy the log and put it
into your existing old heater it burns down. It’s cold.
Same system. And that transparency makes it easy for people
to understand some of the… Well, that’s it.
Well.
From the client side you have the overview of a client. This is
what the client sees of the production and the use of Nabovarme.
We have the propagation temperature
and you have the return temperature, you have the temperature difference
and you have the flow and you have the consumption.
These five graphs you can zoom in and just have it at 1 or 2 minutes
or you can have it for a period like you have from, here, 1st of January
to the 5th of March. But you can also have it for 2 years, 3 years
or just 1 minute, 2 minutes. So this is very easy for people
to see how is there a usage, when and how much
do they actually spend.
Now the accounting system.
That’s one of the headaches for everybody: how to get the money in.
We want to supply, we want to share but we need some money for the pellets.
How do you do it? And first, of course, you would just put it on a document
on your computer, “my neighbor has given me five crowns”
– as we’d use in Denmark – or 10 Euros, “this for the heating of the pellet
from that day to that day”. Ok. And when you have a lot of documents
it makes it very difficult, of course. So you would start with using Excel
spreadsheets or, you know, Opendocs spreadsheets, or whatever,
you know. And in due time you find out that’s complex too, it makes it difficult.
So, then some good guys started making
custom made applications. And this is one of them, this is actually the
latest application called CA (means Christiania,
FORBRUG means expenditure). We’ve developed that
over time and this is for electricity, this is a red one,
you see, and that means that it’s electricity expenditure, and there is
every year one, usually the consumer, but also maybe the area cashier
goes from house to house, takes the number, and puts it into this accounting
system. So you see there, some of them are from 2006, some are from 2015
– one is from ’15 and two is from 2017. This is the expenditure of electricity.
We want of course to do that also for heat.
And this is maybe possible but we need some more people to help us
doing that. So, all this require, of course, individual consumption,
total consumption and production expenses to make this all work.
And that is increasingly difficult to handle. And, on top of that, users are
more demanding. They want to know “how much do I have in our little bank”, or
“how much do I owe the little bank” or “how can we actually balance things up”.
And these data are of course very precious to us, and we do not want to share them
with large companies for anti-surveillance reasons, and this is why we built up
this whole infrastructure, to keep the knowledge inside and to gain total access
of it; but it’s a lot of work, I tell you.
The last thing is, we need your help!
We would love to get some more help on how to improve
things in our systems, and how to cooperate with making the systems
talk together. And we have, on the left side of the stage,
we have ‘Stoffer’ here, he’s our busfactor, you know? If somebody
from bus runs him down, the knowledge is gone. What can we do, we need some more
people knowing what is going on. Our society is so small that we do not know
what to do. If one person disappears a lot of knowledge
disappears with him. So this is a serious problem for us. And then
along, as well, is the demand for the people that we are serving,
they want to know more and more specific details on the consumption,
the production, the energy, the economy. It’s very difficult.
On top of all these things we have installed a lot of solar panels inside Christiania,
to stop using so much of electricity that we buy, and getting down
on buying the pellets. So all these different consumption models,
they coincide, and they need to be balanced out, and we need
to monitor them, to see how much do we actually gain, how much do we lose.
So please, if you have questions – we have the problems
and you can apply if you want to come work with us at the ‘Christiania Researcher in
Residence’ that is the house that we have in Christiania, designed for people that
want to know about Christiania, are going to read or do something, some active sessions
in Christiania. They can come and stay with us for a month, or come back even,
and get some interaction with Christiania. So, thank you for your time,
and I hope you have a lot of questions that we will be glad to answer. Thank you.
*applause*
Herald: Thank you very much for the presentation, Emmerik! So, as you have
heard, we have around 5 minutes for questions, and you have heard, they are
in dire need of ideas, inspirations, support and help. So
line up at the microphones if you have questions. I will start with the internet
if there is a question from the internet. Is that the case?
Signal Angel: No questions yet.
Herald: Alright, then we start with microphone no. 6.
Mic 6: Have you given any… Herald: Please, yeah, perfect.
Mic 6: Have you given any… great talk by the way, thank you,
is there any facts for the distribution of pellets to be more efficient within,
not just like the heating, and how does the actual physical distribution of the
pellets work, and is there any automation ideas around that?
Johannes: Right, … Kristoffer: You got it?
Johannes: We don’t have any sound right now…
Emmerik: I think we lack some sound on Stoffer and on Johannes.
Here is Stoffer. Could you say hello? Kristoffer: Yes, I’m trying to! Hello?
Herald: I think it’s on now! Emmerik: It’s on, it just needs louder!
Johannes: Yes, so right now we have… Emmerik: Could you have the question again?
Johannes: Yes, the question was if we are using any automation for the pellet
systems and the distribution of them. Right now we have huge silos at each
distribution center. So we kind of just get a truck that comes in and,
with pressured air, it just blows all the pellets into these giant silos. Usually
at these productions centers we then have redundant heating production units,
so if one of them goes down we can switch to the other one.
But when it comes to distribution of costs then it is
still small isolated communities that consume their own pellets systems,
so the budget of one small community doesn’t go into the budget of another
community. I hope that was answering the question.
Herald: Alright, microphone no. 1, please.
Mic 1: Hi, thanks for the talk, from me as well. I was wondering if, like…
usually you say, first you do isolation on the buildings and then
you renew the heating systems. Did you do that, because I… like from the photos,
it seems like there’s a lot of old buildings, and stuff. So that would be my first idea
to lower the energy consumption and then putting your system on.
Emmerik: Thank you for… your question looks like this, in here:
first you should insulate your buildings, and then you could add the heating system
instead of the other way round. Is that your question?
Mic 1: Well, I was just wondering if you, like just said, okay, we’re putting
new heating systems, or we first try to lower the consumption and
then look for a new system that, yeah, comes…
Emmerik: The thing is that once you’re poor, first you want to heat to survive.
And then, when you survive, you just suddenly find out there are ways that are
smarter than the ones you thought of before. So you find a house, you stay
there, and you heat it. You don’t find a house insulated and start heating,
no. It’s the other way around. And this tends to extend into many decades.
So that we have a number of very, very old houses, and they’re… some of them are
heritage-restricted, and some of them are just in very bad shape, and
many squatters have been living there before us, and they have not contributed
to the betterment of the houses. Right now, as in a new situation, as we
are looking into eternity, I mean, we’re staying here, we’re not being forced out
by the police or anybody. So, we think longer terms, we say, maybe people live
for 5 years here, but they should contribute to the roof that lasts 30 years
and they should contribute to the insulation that we need to have a better
house in all thirty years. And this is a plan that takes time and effort.
And also needs to be propagated into the mindset of people in Christiania.
And not easy. So first you deliver pellets, you give them heat, you find out
how to avoid the pellets; and you give them insulation to avoid the heat.
This is the way it has been.
Herald: All right think now…
Emmerik: I think you have an extra question? No, is that?
Herald: Maybe you can just find the other people who still have questions, we don’t
have time for all the questions, and you can just talk to them. Now I think it’s
the internet’s turn to ask a question, because they cannot find you afterwards.
Signal Angel: Yes, the internet has some questions. First question is: would it be
possible to have some holiday in Christiania and
help you with your project?
Johannes: Yes, yes, it would be possible, very possible. So please
come join us! You can apply through this web address up here, crir.net.
And you can stay there up to one month, free of charge, of course while contributing.
And we have a very low level of documentation so a lot of human
communication is needed, so you’re very much welcome. Come and join us, and
help us reduce the bus factor – he’s taking the bus every day, we are just waiting
for him to die! So come and join us and help us!
Herald: And I think on that note of the extension of a very kind invitation to
all of you to come and join them and work with them, we have to close the talk.
I saw you all people at microphones 1, 2 and 8 but unfortunately we don’t have
any more time. But just come and find the speakers after the talk, and discuss with
them all the open questions you still have. So please give another warm
round of applause to Johannes, Kristoffer and Emmerik!
*applause*
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*subtitles created by c3subtitles.de in the year 2018*