Sophie Ann Simpson

Energy‐led retrofitting of solid wall dwellings: technical and user perspectives on airtightness

Purpose – Mechanical ventilation with heat recovery (MVHR) is increasingly being promoted in the UK as a means of reducing the CO2 emissions from dwellings, and installers report growing activity in the retrofit market. However, the airtightness of a dwelling is a crucially important factor governing the achievement of CO2 reductions, and the purpose of this paper is to understand the technical implications of airtightness levels in an experimental dwelling, purpose built to typical 1930s standards, at the same time as gaining the users’ perspectives on airtightness and ventilation in their homes.Design/methodology/approach – In‐depth interviews were carried out with 20 households to collect information on their retrofit and improvement strategies, attitudes to energy saving and their living practices as they impinge on ventilation. The experimental house was sealed in a series of interventions, leading to successive reductions in the air permeability as measured by a 50 Pa pressurisation test. The behavi...

Stochastic modelling techniques for generating synthetic energy demand profiles

This paper investigates three stochastic modelling procedures for generating N (user specified) synthetic annual electricity demand profiles at one-minute resolution. The paper reviews previous work in the application of HMM for synthesizing highly stochastic time-series of domestic electricity demand through a sophisticated framework coalescing 480 distinct HMM. The efficiency of a proposed approach for integrating a time-series deseasonalizing technique with a single HMM has been studied in parallel with a compatible stochastic modeling framework of a time-series deseasonalized ARIMA model. Various statistical measures/characteristics of the real and synthetic profiles have been compared for all the three stochastic modelling procedures to identify the most efficient and practically suitable medium for generating synthetic electricity time-series at a fine temporal resolution. Results have been shown for both the individual buildings and the composite (aggregated) profiles of many buildings.