Anticipating Preferred Levels of Thermal Comfort to Facilitate Heating Load Flexibility Dr Bruce Stephen Advanced Electrical Systems Group Institute for Energy and Environment Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering University of Strathclyde Glasgow G1 1RD United Kingdom

Aging Population Attitudes to Sensor Controlled Home Energy APAtSCHE - Funded through 2011 EPSRC BuildTEDDI call Research focused around: Shrinking generation margins may result in novel demand based services being required to balance the system in future Demand response is useless without participation Participation more reliable with automation UK has an aging population – in future more participants will be in the over 55 group - How will they respond to the loss of control? Additional input from EU FP7 ORIGIN project Building performance highly diverse – can’t formulate a physical model in advance for every case Local conditions important – need localised forecast and measurement

Deployment Sites Cloud based monitoring infrastructure 5 trial sites currently uploaded data between October ‘13 and March ‘15 Annan – local authority housing Dumfries – sheltered housing Findhorn - detached modern eco houses Pitlochry – large private housing Castlemilk – tower blocks 3rd party outdoor sensors used Main motivation Understand building characteristics Understand building utilisation

Monitoring* Architecture Cloud Based Server Off-the shelf wireless sensing for energy, environmental and contextual measurements in the premises Monitoring* Architecture ARM or RPi based monitoring hubs for collating wireless sensor measurements to upload to the cloud via home broadband Relational Database HTTP HTTP Upload of weather station or Met site web service forecast and data *ITL: Inneal-tomhais Lèirsinneach – Gaelic for ‘Visible Metering for All’ – an Open Source Cloud based Head End/Top Node for Community Energy Monitoring systems developed during APAtSCHE: https://github.com/itlenergy/itlenergy http://www.itl-energy.com/

Temperature, Humidity Thermal Comfort

Potential for Load Deferral… The heating operation can be deferred as long as this indoor T is between this band – what is the band though? Potential for Load Deferral… Charge or coast?

Indoor Temperature Distribution

Indoor/Outdoor Temperature Relation 10/13 01/14 04/14 08/14 11/14 03/15

Indoor/Outdoor Temperature Relation

Indoor/Outdoor Temperature/Humidity Relation

Summary Different houses have different thermal dynamics How does the environment affect them? Different homes have different thermal comfort levels How and when is heat applied? Can low cost sensors provide useful representations of local conditions? Can highly localised forecasts based on these be accurate enough for street level? Can this be done without building physics models?