Living Lab Home

The Living Lab Home team comprises eight highly motivated TU/e Honors students from five different faculties working on the transition to sustainable living. Our mission is to accelerate the energy transition by bringing together the right partners from the academic and business world to integrate and innovate in the construction environment. We will set a new, higher standard for all homes regarding sustainability, health and cost that can be achieved with technologies available today: a Living Lab Home.

Currently, the building sector is a large polluter and can be held accountable for a significant part of emitted greenhouse gasses. Also, homes are way less energy-efficient than they could be. However, the construction market is slow to adapt, while change must come fast. New homes should be sustainable, healthy, comfortable and affordable.

Our goal is to design and build two demonstration houses on the TU/e campus, next to the Aurora building, in the Spring of 2018. The building is designed as a Living Lab, which means that continuous monitoring, optimization and addition of new systems will ensure that knowledge is created even after the homes have been built. In one of the homes, the modular and demountable character allows for many testing and demonstration opportunities. The second home will be inhabited, so that the interaction with the users can be measured and improved. This makes our Living Lab Home an ideal platform for developing and testing new applications on ie healthcare, smart mobility and smart grids. To ensure these systems are affordable and scalable, an innovative approach to the building process is key. Reducing building costs creates financial breathing room for sustainable technologies. As such, they are also demountable and modular, turning demolition costs into residual value while materials used can be fully recycled. Hereby, flexibility, reduction of materials and volume and efficiency of the building process are essential to make not only the technologies, but also the building itself sustainable. Regarding energy-efficiency, we identify four main technologies: • Building-Integrated PV with thermal collection (BIPV-T) • Seasonal Thermal Energy Storage (STES) • A local nano DC-grid • Intelligent & autonomous control system Using those technologies, our Living Lab Home will be both energy-positive and independent from the grid for a large amount of time.