Energy Meters, Energy Matters: The Upton Homes Project

Nina Hormazabal, Mark Gillott, Janet Jackson

    Research output: Contribution to Book/ReportChapterpeer-review

    Abstract

    This paper presents a small part of a project called SHINE TRUE, a collaboration research project working with businesses and expertise from Universities within the East Midlands, UK. The specific study, a qualitative research called “smart meters – energy matters” was done on the Upton Homes project in Northampton. Given the rapid change on the issues related to sustainability in homes, this project is a real life housing to be studied, learn from it and recommend on the housing issues at all levels. The Upton Homes are commercial sustainable homes built under the Code for Sustainable Homes of the UK and being occupied for all type of occupants, mostly families. On November 2006, one of the consultations proposed in the Energy Review report, “The Energy Challenge” (July 2006) was “Energy Billing and Metering. Changing customer behaviour” (BIS, 2006). It is assumed that by giving home residents a more complete picture of their electricity/gas consumptions, both in real-time and historic usage, will educate and inform people and therefore reduce the energy demand on homes, however, little research to demonstrate the veracity of this assumption has been made. Ten homes were selected to carry out a small trial on the use of monitoring technologies, such as energy meters, with real time display devices to test their possible influence on behaviour among home users in regard to energy consumption in recently built sustainable homes. The study involved the analysis of energy consumption data and verbatim interviews from the ten homes. The quantitative data was statistically analysed using SPSS and the interviews to occupants required a qualitative analysis using NVivo, both results lead to interesting conclusions coming from both, quantitative and qualitative data obtained from real-life case studies of sustainable homes recently built.
    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationProceedings 28th International PLEA Conference on Sustainable Architecture & Urban Design: Opportunities, Limits & Needs: Towards an Environmentally Responsible Architecture
    EditorsJuan Reiser, Cecilia Jimenez, Susana Biondi Antunez de Mayolo
    Place of PublicationLima
    PublisherPontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru
    Pages7
    ISBN (Print)9786124057892
    Publication statusPublished - 1 Nov 2012

    Publication series

    NamePLEA2012 - 28th Conference, Opportunities, Limits & Needs Towards an environmentally responsible architecture Lima, Perú 7-9 November 2012

    Keywords

    • energy consumption
    • energy homes
    • occupant
    • s behaviour

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