Developing English domestic occupancy profiles

ABSTRACT

Occupancy patterns are necessary to estimate energy demand and evaluate thermal comfort in households. Because of this, many European countries are developing representative domestic schedules to replace outdated criteria. This paper evaluates the state of knowledge of UK domestic occupancy patterns and develops new domestic occupancy profiles for England. The presented research (1) characterizes methods for collecting occupancy data and inferring patterns; (2) identifies and assesses the quality of categories of occupancy patterns used in building simulation; and (3) develops updated occupancy profiles. A systematic scoping review identified social and monitoring surveys as the most deployed data-collection methods. A systematic literature review also established that the occupancy categories most frequently used in UK building simulation are (a) a family with dependent children where the parents work full time; and (b) a retired elderly couple who spend most of their time indoors. The interview sample from the English Housing Survey 2014–15 was used to map household typologies. Results show that categories (a) and (b) combined amount to only 19% of England’s households, which suggest models are over-reliant on these groups. Considering this result, the paper develops occupancy patterns for England derived from 2015 UK Time Use Survey diaries for each household typology previously identified.

KEYWORDS:

• demographics
• households
• modelling
• monitoring
• occupancy patterns
• occupant behaviour
• occupants
• social survey
• time
• time use

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the H2020-EEB-2016 European project [grant number 723562 (THERMOSS)]. It was also supported by a project on occupancy patterns supported by the former UK Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) (University of Southampton (UoS), 2016) (see https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/scoping-review-of-occupancy-patterns).