Texas A&M Smart and Connected Homes Testbed (TAM-SCHT): An Evaluation and Demonstration Platform for Smart & Grid-interactive Technologies.

With buildings accounting for 70% of electrical demand, the electrical grid will require a more reliable and resilient demand side management from buildings. Building decarbonization is pushing for the advancement of grid-interactive efficient buildings (GEBs) to improve the energy efficiency and demand flexibility of residential households. In the last decade, smart home technologies have been explored to increase energy efficiency, improve occupant comfort, and leverage distributed energy resources (DERs) to increase the grid resilience of households. A smart and connected home testbed, consisting of identical 1,200 ft2 houses, has been designed and constructed to allow for an apples-to-apples comparison of smart home technologies. Potential research topics, which will be explored in this testbed, include the performance of high-efficient HVAC equipment, the energy and indoor air quality benefits with high-performance building envelope (e.g., wall, window, etc.), HVAC operation using smart sensors and controls, smart and connected appliances, etc. Furthermore, this testbed will enable the evaluations and comparisons of advanced demand side flexibility strategies with conventional controls in a controlled laboratory testing environment in terms of energy efficiency, load flexibility, and indoor air quality. The location of each house was determined considering surrounding environments (e.g., solar shadows). The testbed has been heavily instrumented with sensors and meters. For example, each house is equipped with a wide range of sensors, including thermocouples and heat flux sensors throughout to measure the heat gain of the building envelope. Indoor conditions will be monitored throughout the household with temperature, relative humidity, CO2, total volatile organic compound, and particulate matter sensors to measure the indoor air quality and the effects on occupancy comfort. A weather station set up on site will also report the local weather conditions for the houses. The buildings will be equipped with a humidifier and heater in each room to simulate the building loads from occupancy and other household appliances throughout the day. An hourly profile has been created for weekends and weekdays for each room to be followed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]