Energy House Labs is contributing to a new policy position paper exploring how Britain’s smart metering infrastructure could be used to monitor and manage indoor warmth and comfort across homes.
The proposed Smart Meter Enabled Environmental Sensing approach sets out how existing infrastructure could be used to deliver consistent, trusted indoor environmental data across millions of properties.
Co-authored with the Smart Data Communications Company (Smart DCC) Policy & Innovation team and the University of Salford’s Smart Meters > Smart Homes Lab, the paper will be submitted to Government and key industry stakeholders for consultation and feedback. It will then be reviewed and refined to ensure it is robust, evidence-based, and aligned with the needs and priorities of the housing sector.
With around 23 million smart metered homes and small businesses connected through a single, secure national network, Britain is already positioned for large-scale environmental sensing.
The potential impact includes more reliable monitoring of indoor temperature and humidity, which can support public health interventions, inform regulation, and provide an evidence base for assessing in-use building performance and identifying issues in housing stock.
Dr Ioannis Paraskevas, Head of the Smart Meters > Smart Homes Lab at Energy House Labs, University of Salford, said:
“We now have a real opportunity to go further and unlock the value of Britain’s already advanced and secure smart metering infrastructure beyond energy and billing.
By enabling large-scale environmental sensing, we can support better outcomes for residents, provide robust evidence for policy and retrofit, and do so using infrastructure that already exists and has been funded by the public.”
The paper also highlights the risk that without a coordinated approach, fragmented and duplicated solutions may emerge, potentially leading to higher costs, limited scalability, and poor interoperability across the sector.
The policy position paper demonstrates the potential of combining existing national infrastructure with academic and industry expertise to support scalable approaches to built environment challenges.