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Owing to the high energy consumption in the building sector, appraising the thermal performance of building envelopes is an increasing concern. Recently, a few in situ methodologies to diagnose the thermal parameters of buildings have been considered. However, because of their limitations such as low accuracy, limited number of measurements, and the high cost of monitoring devices, researchers are seeking a new alternative. In this study, a novel hyper-efficient Arduino transmittance-meter was introduced to overcome these limitations and determine the thermal parameters of building envelopes. Unlike conventional methodologies, the proposed transmittance-meter is based on synchronized measurements of different parameters necessary to estimate the transmittance parameter. To verify the applicability of the transmittance-meter, an experimental study was conducted wherein a temperature-controlled box model was thermally monitored, and the outputs of the transmittance-meter employed were compared with those captured by a commercial device. The results revealed a high level of reduction in cost and a low range of difference compared with the latter, thereby validating the applicability of the proposed thermal monitoring system.

In recent years, many scholars have dedicated their research to the development of low-cost sensors for monitoring of various parameters. Despite their high number of applications, the state of the art related to low-cost sensors in building monitoring has not been addressed. To fill this gap, this article presents a systematic review, following well-established methodology, to analyze the state of the art in two aspects of structural and indoor parameters of buildings, in the SCOPUS database. This analysis allows to illustrate the potential uses of low-cost sensors in the building sector and addresses the scholars the preferred communication protocols and the most common microcontrollers for installation of low-cost monitoring systems. In addition, special attention is paid to describe different areas of the two mentioned fields of building monitoring and the most crucial parameters to be monitored in buildings. Finally, the deficiencies in line with limited number of studies carried out in various fields of building monitoring are overviewed and a series of parameters that ought to be studied in the future are proposed.