Historical building refurbishment and Smart Home: literature review and case study

??In the last decades, the internet of things (IoT) evolution started to spread across every kind of object, with the creation of new connected environments and devices. The innovation hence streamed also over the house and its components, transforming it and evolving its devices and appliances, sometimes changing the way people communicate with its parts. The entrance in the market by tech giants such as Google and Amazon, providing newer and simpler solutions to unify the control of all the devices will – and already is – boost significantly the adoption of this technology by the users. The aim of this work is to investigate how this technology works, how it changes the relationship between the users and their house, assessing if it is possible to experience energetical improvements due to the innovation. Considering the existence of negative sides of the innovation, both from a user experience and from a privacy and security perspective, the work tries to understand if energetical savings can be reached thanks to the smart home instalment, which is its potential and which are its limits. A relevant interest is dedicated to the literature regarding those buildings raised before the end of the World War II. Their distribution across Europe is not negligible, while emission regulations are constantly increasing their attention to the building sector, responsible of a high stake of the emission. Also, there is great difference in the emission generated by an efficient household and a low-efficiency building. With the European Directives 2010/31/EU and 2012/27/EC, increasing limits were defined also for the buildings with a recognized heritage value. The historical and environmental value is therefore not anymore a justification not to meet the environmental legislation. This work reports the results of the scientific discussion about this matter and the solutions found in the literature in that sense, adding the analysis of a case study. In fact, the refurbishment (performed between 2019 and 2020) of an historical building - raised in 1922 and located in the Italian city of Turin – is analyzed and compared with the present literature, assessing the improvements that it is possible to achieve. Energetical efficiency, capital expense, management savings and emission reduction are discussed, while considering if it is possible to save the historical and environmental value carried by the ancient, but low-efficient buildings.