Danfoss & Trifork co-create large scale, eco-friendly floor heating solution

Customer

Danfoss

Industry

Manufacturing

Control the heating of your home in one app

In 2017, Trifork and Danfoss created the DEVIsmart™ App, alongside the DEVIreg™ Smart thermostats, for customers to more conveniently manage the comfort and heating of their homes. However, in 2019, with the growing pressures to become more sustainable in energy and cost reduction, Danfoss enlisted the help of Trifork once again to create the DEVIweb™ solution for their enterprise customers.

Customize each room

Trifork and Danfoss wanted to change the world by turning heating off in rooms that are not in use. However, a main pain point for customers who run large building facilities, such as hotels and nursing homes, is that they house many rooms with electrical floor heating, which requires manual work related to managing the heating of each individual room.

There are many factors that contribute to necessary changes in the thermostats, in order to customize the rooms to the guests needs:

WIFI password changes
Weather forecasts where facilities might want to lower or raise the temperature of the rooms at different scheduled times
Room occupancy – ensuring heat is not wasted in empty rooms

The idea was to create a solution where staff could administrate and integrate many thermostats from one centralized location in order to help save energy in unused rooms.

Some of the key needs for this solution were:

Eliminate tedious and manual tasks
Central control of heating systems in large buildings with several rooms
Safe cloud solution
To increase the comfort and satisfaction of guests/users while saving money
The possibility to control many on/off electrical applications
Access from any location

“This solution has helped our customers save so much – not only in the time it takes to install & commission the thermostats, but also in energy consumption”

Gasper Benedik

Head of R&D, Danfoss

Controlling thermostats from a single web application

Trifork, with Danfoss, created DEVIweb™ – a single page installer application, based on Microsoft Azure. The Azure Active Directory B2C was used to authorize the log in to DEVIweb™. The DEVIweb™ frontend is written in React, a Javascript framework, which communicates with the backend via a REST interface. The application is designed to be generic in order to allow the connection to other devices, other than the DEVI Smart thermostat.

The application allows staff to set up thermostats in specific locations and then control them completely from the web interface. The solution also enables new configurations to be pushed out for an allocated group of thermostats in certain parts of the building at once.

The DEVIweb™ solution uses Secure Device Grid, a protocol that ensures a secure connection to over 60,000 DEVI Smart thermostats. The connectivity platform was developed from scratch by Danfoss and Trifork, for the previous DEVI project, as no such platform existed before.

Trifork was also involved in the mobile development of the solution and created a specific installer app for Android and iOS. In order to succeed with the pilot versions, Trifork performed field tests on real sites.

A long-term strategic partner

The DEVIweb™ solution went live in November of 2019 at two locations: a nursing home with 130 thermostats in Norway and a hotel with 70 thermostats in Austria.

The goal was not only to save money for large facilities on their heating costs but to positively impact the climate in the smartest way possible. Trifork Smart Building & IoT takes pride in being long-term strategic partners, not looking for the “quick-fix”, and is open to co-investing with customers if the business case is strong and in line with our values – much like Danfoss and the DEVI solutions are. We look forward to seeing the results of the DEVIweb™ solution in 2020 and the impact it has made.