Sustainable Living Assistant

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The SuLA project is the vision of a home supervising service which will enable house-owners and social housing providers to provide a service that will allow householders to reduce energy use in their homes and save on energy costs for space heating. This is particularly important in the Northern Periphery region where many of the inhabitants are in a position of fuel poverty because of the harsh climate and high energy costs. The service will be customisable for various heating sources, as well as ventilation and air conditioning equipment and will take into account local climatic variations. The concept includes knowledge based decision making software that will make a comparison with expected equipment performance for the recorded climate conditions and will advise on good operating practice, expected performance and/or make an alarm in the service centre to take over control of faulty systems. The project will create baseline to build up a robust service which can be taken up by device manufacturers, automation, Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) professionals and other experts with advanced knowhow in energy efficiency issues. The project will clearly demonstrate the operation of the service through a ‘triple helix’ of academic institutions to develop the service, a social housing partnership to host the service, and an SME (an associate partner) to monitor and respond to the service calls. The project seeks to address the widely acknowledged issue of inefficient consumption of energy as residents try to supply the basic heating needs in their home, and overall savings of 10% in heating bills are anticipated.

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