It is anticipated that the wider deployment of Smart Home systems will give building occupants improved control and automation capabilities over building conditions, services and equipment. These smart technologies will also provide numerous streams of data which could help to identify opportunities to reduce energy demand in homes. This paper explores this topic by focusing on data gathered from Smart Home systems, installed in a sample of five UK homes, which provide occupants with advanced zonal space heating control. Initial results suggest that Smart Home data can generate useful information to assist energy demand reduction; including the identification of excessive heat loss from specific rooms, periods of unoccupied heating, and heating system characteristics that lead to suboptimal heating patterns. Practical issues encountered during the field study highlight important social and contextual factors that can influence the quality of data recorded. These factors could potentially impede the wider adoption of Smart Home technologies with zonal heating functions. This work is continuing and the next steps are to calculate the energy savings which would result after data from Smart Home systems was used to identify inefficient homes, systems or practices.
Funding
This work has been carried out as part of the REFIT project (‘Personalised Retrofit Decision Support Tools for UK Homes using Smart Home Technology’, £1.5m, Grant Reference EP/K002457/1).
History
School
Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering
Published in
8th International Conference on Energy Efficiency in Domestic Appliances and Lighting (EEDAL)
Citation
COLEMAN, M., ...et al., 2015. Utilizing smart home data to support the reduction of energy demand from space heating – insights from a UK field study. IN: 8th International Conference on Energy Efficiency in Domestic Appliances and Lighting (EEDAL), Lucerne-Horw, Switzerland, 26-28 Aug.
Publisher
EEDAL 2015
Version
AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 2.0 International (CC BY 2.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
Publication date
2015
Notes
This is an Open Access Article. It is published by European Commisssion under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Unported Licence (CC BY). Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/