Currently, it is becoming increasingly common to find numerous electronic devices installed
in office and residential spaces as part of building automation solutions. These devices provide a rich
set of data related to the inside and outside environment, such as indoor and outdoor temperature,
humidity, and solar radiation. However, commercial of-the-shelf climatic control systems continue
to rely on simple controllers like proportional-integral-derivative or even on-off, which do not take
into account such variables. This work evaluates the potential performance gains of adopting more
advanced controllers, in this case based on pole-placement, enhanced with additional variables,
namely solar radiation and external temperature, obtained with dedicated low-cost sensors. This
approach is evaluated both in simulated and real-world environments. The obtained results show
that pole-placement controllers clearly outperform on-off controllers and that the use of the additional
variables in pole-placement controllers allows relevant performance gains in key parameters such as
error signal MSE (17%) and control signal variance (40%), when compared with simple PP controllers.
The observed energy consumption savings obtained by using the additional variables are marginal
(≈1%, but the reduction of the error signal MSE and control signal variance have a significant impact
on energy consumption peaks and on equipment lifetime, thus largely compensating the increase in
the system complexity.