1. 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

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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:

5. Temperature, Humidity
Thermal Comfort

6. 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?

7. Indoor Temperature Distribution

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

9. Indoor/Outdoor Temperature Relation

10. Indoor/Outdoor Temperature/Humidity Relation

11. 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?