Scottish innovator arbnco is trialling a new digital air quality platform with consumers in the Living Lab with the aim of reducing indoor air pollution, improving ventilation, and safeguarding health.

Around seven million deaths worldwide, and 40,000 in the UK, are attributed to air pollution each year. Yet indoor air quality – including levels of carbon dioxide (CO₂), volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and particulate matter (PM) – can often be overlooked compared to outdoor air quality linked to vehicle emissions, despite being up to five times worse in places.

Analysing the air quality results with data on the property and occupants will allow arbnco to deliver alerts on potential harms and advice on mitigating health impacts.

With a growing focus on improving ventilation in buildings due to Covid-19, coupled with the need to improve energy efficiency and therefore the airtightness of homes, the global ventilation market is expanding rapidly, already exceeding £2b in value and expected to reach almost £9b by 2027.

The Living Lab trial comes in the slipstream of arbnco being awarded almost £300k in funding from Innovate UK’s Small Business Research Initiative (SBRI) competition, which is supporting innovators in developing and demonstrating new products and services which monitor a wide range of household pollutants.

AirEx Technologies was the first company to trial a product in the Living Lab.

Testing a smart ventilation control — an intelligent air brick — the Living Lab Airex with performance validation and consumer feedback to refine their offering.

AirEx has since attracted further investment, regulatory acceptance and increased their turnover fivefold, including:

• Selected as one of only five technologies approved by energy regulator Ofgem for the ECO 3 Scheme.
• Secure funding from IUK in the ‘Innovation in response to global disruption’ competition, designed to boost economic recovery from the impact of COVID-19 (improving indoor air quality for vulnerable people).

“The data that the Living Lab provided us, helped us accelerate our evidence gathering from 24 to 12 months — which is absolutely crucial for a small start-up like Airex.”
Agnes Czako
Co-founder, Airex

Amp X are developing an autonomous, digital energy assistant ‘ALICE’ with a trial in the Living Lab. The ALICE platform aims to help UK households reduce their energy costs and carbon intensity through  autonomous demand-side-response decisions based on real-world market signals.

ALICE will schedule energy usage by household devices’ when the energy is greenest and cheapest, with the aim that households could benefit by providing flexibility to local networks to improve grid resilience and maximise renewable energy usage.

The trial sees the ALICE energy assistant installed in 60 Living Lab homes and working with our Consumer Insight specialists to understand household experiences, test the benefits and to understand customer value proposition.

“Consumer engagement is a key barrier to demand–response as a scalable non–wire alternative. Energy Systems Catapult’s analysis helped us validate what features of our solution work best for different user–types and properties to help sell the benefits to the consumer market.”
Dr Irene Di Martino
Head of Amp X

Watch the case study:

Thermal storage manufacturer Sunamp is to receive £9.25 million to develop and trial its advanced thermal storage system in 100 homes across the UK. Sunamp will extend their existing heat battery to provide increased storage duration and capacity and pair it with household energy systems to tackle periods of low renewables generation on the grid.

The funding is awarded through the Longer Duration Energy Storage Demonstration programme, part of the Net Zero Innovation Portfolio (NZIP) from the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero of which provides funding for low-carbon technologies and systems.

A heat pump will charge renewable heat into large capacity time-shifting thermal storage, delivering space heating and hot water on demand. The bulk of input electrical energy is from offsite wind energy. Customers will have the option of part ownership of a wind farm through Ripple Energy. The proposed system uses smart control logic from myenergi and a significantly large thermal storage from Sunamp to overcome lulls in wind energy supply.

In addition, the Living Lab now connects to our new Whole Energy Systems Accelerator, allowing us to test the benefits that Sunamp’s heat battery technology brings to the wider electricity network, utilising real-time data on real world household behaviour.