34C3 - “Nabovarme” opensource heating infrastructure in Christiania

https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-8989-nabovarme_opensource_heating_infrastructure_in_christiania

Freetown Christiania´s digitally controlled/surveyed heating system. 350 users

Project “Nabovarme” (meaning “neighbour heating”) has transformed private heating necessity into a social experiment build on OpenSource software/hardware and social empowerment by transforming heat consumers into Nabovarme Users and letting them take ownership to infrastructure and consumption.

Christiania - a child of hippie thinking and direct democracy, est. 1971
900 inhabitants, 210 houses, 24 hectares land, 1 km from the danish parliament and the royal palace
Local common ownership to ALL infrastructure:
houses, roads, electricity, water, sewers, fiber LAN, park and lakes
Nabovarme (started 2001) has connected more than half of Christiania
Previously heating was based on private wood burning stoves, coal burning stoves and oilheaters, Nabovarme has created a transition towards common heating systems based on burning wood pellets.
Nabovarme has transformed the heating infrastructure into a social experiment built on OpenSource software/hardware and social empowerment and is transforming passive heat consumers into active Nabovarme Users -making everyone take ownership of the infrastructure and a goal of optimizing usage for economic and climate reasons.
Current technologies for heating systems are proprietary and full of protocols hidden behind NDA's.
Our project has unlocked a broad range of devices so data and control now is in the hands of the users - and not sent out of the community.
The project is a cross competence endeavor where equal amounts of plumbing, infrastructure building and digging, electronics and software has been needed to fulfill the task.
The project tells the story about:
A society embracing OpenSource before the term was declared
Communities going together and creating a common heating solution to lower the environmental impact and risk of fire and increase the level of autonomy.
The creation of a custom fitted, self administered payment model.

We have liberated devices controlling the production of heat (NBE Pellet system, Kamstrup meter systems) and made devices (MeterLogger) used for metering heat and electricity consumption using open source. We are in the process of bringing easy readable consumption data to the focus of christiania citizens - for all of us to take climate action.

Johannes Valbjorn Emmerik

https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2017/Fahrplan/events/8989.html

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

postroll music

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