Defining the modern smart house

What role does digital technology play in defining the modern smart home? We are at the point where smart house technology is becoming the norm in new builds and retrofit projects. By Oliver Rehm, chief executive officer of Baufritz in the UK

Let’s try to break down a smart house into its constituent elements and understand the role of technology and the services it can deliver.

It has evolved from analogue home automation where labour-saving machines and building services such as heating and washing, could be scheduled. Today, computers and digitalisation have become part of our household devices; they have integrated with communication protocols and they fundamentally change the way we manage our houses. I would like to investigate smart digital technology and climate change mitigation. Greenhouse gas emissions for homes arise primarily from the fossil fuels burned for heating, followed by electricity used to power devices. Going forwards, houses must be much more energy-efficient.

A super energy-efficient house creates its own set of challenges, which can only be addressed by using Smart buildings technology. All houses need to breathe. Once all the drafts and thermal bridges have been removed, different approaches are needed to manage ventilation. Clearly, opening a window results in heat loss so the inclusion of a Mechanical Ventilation Heat Recovery System manages air-flow while minimising heat loss. By including sensors within the house, ventilation is efficiently managed. An energy-efficient house is designed to optimise solar gain by using the sun as a heat source.

In summer, when the sun is strongest, there is a risk of overheating. By including a smart shading system, which can be programmed to reduce the effect of the sun within the users’ defined tolerances, an ideal building ambience can be maintained.

During the colder months when solar gain is at its lowest, all but the most energy efficient houses require additional heat sources.

At this point in time the most popular choice that does not involve burning hydrocarbons, is a ground or air source heat pump, which works like a refrigerator in reverse. The caveat is that it would struggle to deliver enough heat to warm a house that had not undergone energy efficiency improvements. In the future we may have gas boilers powered by zero carbon emitting Hydrogen, which would be able to deliver the energy needed to heat some of our legacy building stock.

By including Solar and PV we have an alternative approach to reduce the buildings KWh/m2/year. A normal domestic PV should deliver around 3.5 KWh of electricity over the year, which is roughly 50% of the average household energy consumption. Providing your house is energy efficient, PV can generate more than enough electricity to deliver the required energy.

The obvious caveat is that energy usage is higher in winter when PV is at its least efficient. Additional battery storage can mitigate spikes in consumption patterns, but it is most likely that energy will be fed into the grid over the summer and any shortfall will have to be made up from additional supplies. Smart connect devices can deliver data in a digital format, which in turn is processed either by human interaction, or via software to deliver a positive outcome. In its simplest form, the house owner can use information to make informed decisions on how to reduce energy consumption.

Applications such as GIRA and HIVE can integrate with smart phones, allowing the owner to better control heating and lighting. The next stage involves automating these processes. The algorithms within applications can understand your behaviour patterns and automatically optimise lighting and heating. Currently. renewable energy suppliers are using artificial intelligence to predict weather patterns and future energy supply. By providing this data directly to the smart home, the availability of (cheap) electricity could be predicted and consumption patterns matched to supply.

In this scenario, demand patterns are allowed to increase to match supply. The obvious opportunity relates to electric vehicle charging. With 60 to 80 kWh batteries becoming the norm, there is going to be a huge amount of storage capacity connected to the grid ready to consume any excess supply as it becomes available. Similarly understanding supply from domestic PV will reduce the imbalance between supply and consumption.

As our houses have become digitalised, these devices are able to work together as systems. As a home-owner it is very important that you bear this point in mind when designing your smart home. Think of it as a single integrated ecosystem and include a services layer, built into the fabric of the build when you define your new house design.

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