Energy House ‘realtime’ laboratory

Sited in Salford University, Manchester, the Energy House is a unique research and testing laboratory that comprises an early 20th century two-bedroom terraced house within an environmental chamber allowing an accurate and rapid assessment of energy-efficient retrofit technologies.

It is a traditional construction – solid brick walls, suspended timber floors and single-glazed windows with a conventional “wet” heating system fired by a gas boiler. The environmental chamber can be used to simulate a wide variety of weather conditions with a temperature range from -12°C to +30°C. The chamber is also equipped with rigs to simulate wind, rain, snow and incident solar radiation.

Throughout the chamber and the house there are over 200 monitoring points with real-time data collection of parameters such as temperature, humidity, heat flux, electricity and gas consumption.

The facility underpins a range of research topics including:

• Building physics/performance;

• Sensors/data collection;

• Data analysis and visualisation;

• Human factors;

• Smart meters and connected homes. Energy House explores issues of energy consumption in buildings. It uses data from large-scale field trials and building performance tests to construct accurate models and simulations of buildings and data analytics to look at large data sets of building and energy performance. The research team works with partners across a range of commercial and grant-funded projects, providing a comprehensive offer of energy and buildings expertise.

BEAMA Specifier & Installer Guides

The BEAMA underfloor heating group also produces various guides primarily aimed at installers and specifiers to provide valuable resources that include information on compliance with regulations, control technologies, and evidence on the energy savings from controls. Among these are the following:

•The guide to low-profile and responsive underfloor heating;

•Choosing the floor covering to maximise the underfloor heating efficiency;

•Guide to underfloor heating controls for domestic properties;

•Guide to types of underfloor heating pipework.