Creating a laboratory for domestic energy usage

Energy use under the microscope

EDOL has evolved from the Smart Energy Research Lab – a project led by UCL that has been collecting the smart meter data and survey responses from 13,000 households since 2019.

“The SERL data has very clearly shown us how energy use changes.

“We were able to observe the impact COVID had on how people consume energy in their homes. More recently we've been observing the cost-of-living crisis, where fuel prices have doubled.

“However, the problem with the SERL data is that it tells us what is changing, but doesn’t fully explain why it’s changing. That’s partly because we don’t collect enough contextual information, or disaggregated energy consumption data.

“The gas meters let us know when we’re using more energy, but we don’t know whether that’s because people are heating their homes more or just simply using more hot water.

“So that’s really the focus of EDOL – to understand the ‘why’.”

To gather the additional data, EDOL draws from the original SERL sample of 13,000 homes, placing 2,000 households from that group in an ‘observatory’.

The observatory households will be equipped with additional sensors to monitor for example internal temperature and ten seconds instead of every half hour electricity use.

Perhaps one of the most exciting aspects of EDOL is the deployment of ‘field laboratories’. These much smaller groups of between 100 and 200 households will be used to test out policies, technologies, business models and other interventions – allowing the EDOL team to help bridge the gap between research and policy development.

While undertaking this more detailed monitoring in the EDOL observatory and laboratories, some homes may well demonstrate energy use which is still difficult to understand. In these cases, the EDOL team will seek to work in partnership with the participants and undertake ‘forensic’ monitoring and analysis. This could include additional detailed surveys, interviews and in-depth monitoring.

Having spent the last year developing the novel methods they’ll use for the observatory and forensic analyses, the EDOL team are preparing to work more closely with the sampled households and begin field testing.

Participant households in the smaller observatory sample or the forensic analyses will be compensated for the additional inconvenience they’ll experience. Tadj is looking forward to uncovering answers through forensic analysis to some of the questions that have arisen from the SERL data.

“When we get EDOL fully running, we can start to understand some of the strange things that we can’t currently understand.

“For example, previous studies have raised questions about solar thermal that we’d really like to get to the bottom of – we couldn’t do it at the time because we didn’t have EDOL.”