Located in one of the most deprived areas in Glasgow, Scotland, our clients at ng homes are working to re-shape the landscape for social housing tenants. Their focus is on providing safe, affordable, well-heated homes for the families that live in their homes, whilst also being conscious of reducing emissions and working towards the country’s ambitious carbon reduction goals.
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With a wide range of housing stock under their remit, ng homes were looking to audit the energy use within their tower block buildings, as part of a large scale building upgrade programme. Our team worked to determine the key issues in the buildings, looking into the way in which resources were being used by tenants and how this impacted their daily lives. Following this, the goal was to establish how energy could be conserved in the future, supporting tenants and bringing about positive environmental impacts.
To gather the initial data, our team worked within the tower blocks to install a variety of tiny sensors which use a LoRaWAN connection to feedback data every ten minutes. It is our primary IoT solution for properties, and in this project two sensors were installed per residence: one in the living room and one in the bedroom of each flat. This was duplicated in served 350 flats across 15 blocks; totalling approximately 700 sensors installed by our data team.
Once the sensors were installed, collecting information on internal temperature, relative humidity and CO2 levels, internal vapour pressure and differential vapour pressure. Our data team were able to review the incoming data, working to ascertain, according to Scottish Government metrics, which residents were in fuel poverty, which would inform future development plans. Specifically, we looked to find out who met both gate one and gate two of the fuel poverty calculation:
Gate 1: The resident spends over 10% of their post-housing income on energy (20% for extreme fuel poverty)
Gate 2: The resident earns less than 90% of the MIS Minimum Income Requirement for their given demographic group.
Our findings summarised that the vast majority of tenants in the buildings were living in fuel poverty; with 60% in fuel poverty and 20% in extreme fuel poverty (approximately 80% aggregated). The national average according to the Scottish Government is that approximately 25% of people are in fuel poverty (with 7% in extreme fuel poverty), and so these properties hugely exceeded the average. We were also able to identify that the homes were losing heat through windows and the use of inefficient heating, which was causing a further rise in fuel bills and wasted energy.
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The stark contrast in the data collected by Chameleon against the national average enabled us to put forward a proposal to the local authority as to the most efficient and economically viable heating systems to install to alleviate fuel poverty and bring the stock up to EESSH2 standard. The aim of this project was to alleviate fuel poverty concerns, whilst making the building more energy efficient, by installing heating systems which would conserve energy and use renewable sources, reducing bills and providing a better living environment for each tenant.
As a result of this project, Chameleon were able to:
Improve the health and wellbeing of over 900 families
Reduce energy consumption by 66.22%
Reduce CO2 by over 1 million kg CO2e per year
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