Empirical data from a newly built apartment in London to improve the reliability of overheating models – early reflections from an ongoing study

Building Regulations (Part O) require new homes to undergo overheating risk assessments. Dynamic thermal models are commonly used for this, but their accuracy in predicting summertime indoor temperatures has been questioned in previous studies using the Loughborough Matched Pair test houses. These older houses are unlike the newly built dwellings that will be assessed for overheating under Part O, but data suitable for empirical validation of new homes does not yet exist. To address this knowledge gap, this paper presents the first-of-its-kind empirical data collection in an unoccupied newly built apartment (flat) in London that can be used for model validation. The study is ongoing, so indoor temperature data are withheld to allow for future blind validation. But the paper discusses how this dataset can be used to improve the accuracy of dynamic thermal models and more reliably assess the overheating risk of new homes. We propose several uses for the dataset and acknowledge its strengths and limitations.