SERL participates in new project linking data from longitudinal surveys, smart meters, and in-home sensors.
The SERL/EDOL team at UCL are working with the UK Household Longitudinal Study: Understanding Society and the Urban Big Data Centre (UBDC) at the University of Glasgow on a new project which links data on energy use and the indoor environment, collected from smart meters and indoor sensors.
The data will be made available as part of the Household Longitudinal Study dataset, and will enable researchers to build a more detailed picture of energy use and the internal environment in homes, in order to carry out a range of innovative research and make recommendations to improve health and quality of life, and to reduce energy consumption.
Sensors, smart data, and surveys
Participating homes – who are already participating in the UK Household Longitudinal Study – have consented to have a sensor unit in their homes which can gather data on indoor air temperature and humidity, and to have their energy consumption collected from their existing smart meters. Additional building efficiency and demographic survey data will also be collected, together enabling a detailed picture to be built of the homes, which can then be compared and contrasted with other homes in the study. The project hopes to identify the relationships between building conditions and health, financial wellbeing, and energy consumption.
SERL’s main role in the project is to provide the expertise and infrastructure to gather the smart meter data needed to contribute to the study’s collection of linked data streams. The project is innovative in that it utilises the large-scale longitudinal nature of Understanding Society, smart meter data collected by SERL, and the data from the in-home sensors. Together, these data steams should enable a more complete picture to be built up of the often complex and nuanced relationships between building conditions, energy usage and occupant actions that create the indoor environment of a home, and which contribute to a household’s wellbeing.
The power of data linkage
SERL Director Simon Elam said: “While previous research has linked some of the data we are linking for this study, there is a lack of good quality datasets linking all the proposed types of data that we will be collecting, and thus there are significant gaps in what we know about households’ use of energy, the relationship to their homes and to their socio-economic circumstances.”
The project has two major strengths:
1. The linked datasets can answer specific questions on the relationships between energy usage, homes and the indoor environment, and people’s socio economic and geographical circumstances. The project team aims to use a range of techniques such as bottom-up regression models, machine learning predictive models and cluster analysis to investigate these relationships and provide valuable insights for policy and practice.
2. If the project successfully shows that it is possible to collect and link data from the three sources (Understanding Society; smart meters; and indoor sensors) in an accurate, reliable, and cost-effective way, it will open up the opportunity for ongoing longitudinal analysis and extending this to larger samples in future surveys.
• For previous work in this area by the project team, see Smart Energy Research Lab: Energy use in GB domestic buildings 2021: SERL Statistical Reports
• Read more on UBDC website: Indoor environment and energy use study
• Read more about Understanding Society and the Household Longitudinal Study