SMART HOUSING | COGAN TERRACE STREET WISE Passivhaus standards of energy efficiency were delivered in two Cardiff homes by installing a sensor network that monitored room occupancy, temperature and air quality. Atamates David Miles, Dan Cash and Kat Kelly explain References: 1 Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. The Future Homes Standard, 2019, p98 2 Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, Digest of United Kingdom energy statistics 2019, p182 3 Committee on Climate Change, Reducing UK emissions: 2018 progress report to government, June 2018, p267 4 Kelly K A, Sassi P and Miles J, In-use energy performance of automated smart homes, SDAR* Journal of Sustainable Design & Applied Research, 2019, Vol 7, p12 5 Atamate, How to improve the energy efficiency of newbuild homes, Oxford: Atamate, 2019, p13 6 Committee on Climate Change, UK housing: fit for the future?, February 2019, p135 7 Siddall M and Grant, N, Claiming the Passivhaus Standard: Technical briefing document, London: Passivhaus Trust UK, 2015, p9 8 Sassi, P, A natural ventilation alternative to the Passivhaus Standard for a mild maritime climate, Buildings, 2013, Vol 3, pp61-78 T he UK governments Future Homes consultation paper makes an unambiguous commitment: by 2025, we will introduce a Future Homes Standard for new-build homes to be future-proofed with low carbon heating and world-leading levels of energy efficiency.1 At a time when domestic energy accounts for 29% of energy consumption2 and 15% of greenhouse gas emissions3 in the UK, reforms that would cut bills and carbon dioxide emissions are sorely needed. A recent case study suggests that building energy management systems, long the preserve of teams managing large commercial buildings, have developed to the point where they can now play a major role in bringing down energy costs in the domestic sector. The study was led by Kat Kelly, of Atamate, and Paola Sassi, of Oxford Brookes University, who analysed space-heating data from six domestic flats fitted with a domestic building control system.4 As a smart building technology designed for the domestic market,5 Atamate can be tailored to the needs of any home and incorporated during the initial design, or retrofitted to an existing building. It runs in the background once its parameters are set, and users can operate the system in a number of ways, such as by setting parameters using a smartphone app or controlling services directly using switches. The installation used for the analysis was in 14 and 16 Cogan Terrace, two houses in a Cardiff suburb built to modern standards of insulation and airtightness. Each house was divided into three flats rented to students and young professionals. Post-occupancy evaluations often find that buildings consume more energy than predicted in the standard assessment procedure (SAP) model used to judge their efficiency. Kelly and Sassi aimed to test whether building controls can close that performance gap by evaluating energy use in a building occupied by tenants whose energy bills were included in their rent, giving them no strong incentive to limit their energy use. The year they analysed ran from midSeptember 2017 to mid-September 2018, Schematic of the Atamate system Database 32 July 2020 www.cibsejournal.com CIBSE July 2020 p32-34 Atamate.indd 32 19/06/2020 17:42