domX

Efficient control of heating and DHW preparation for Natural Gas consuming boilers in Greece

Area

5 main Greek cities (Athens, Thessaloniki, Larisa, Trikala, Volos)

Participants

Residential clients of DOMX with their families

Direct participants

100 households

Potential replicants in the area

5000 households

Unique Features

  • Optimal and efficient tuning of legacy natural gas boilers for heating and DHW preparation (up to 35% efficiency increase), by exposing previously unused control capabilities, such as modulation control, weather compensation, scheduling, and others
  • Accurate gas consumption estimation without the need of installing metering equipment
  • Central portfolio management through cloud-based algorithms for demand aggregation
  • Existing collaboration and access to the customer portfolio (>5K) of major Greek Gas supplier

Available infrastructure and tools

  • 100 legacy natural gas boilers attached with the low-cost heating controller of DOMX providing efficient and remote control
  • Proprietary IoT monitoring platform for centralized demand monitoring and management
  • Smartphone application for collecting end-user input, comfort limits, and user-perceived comfort and satisfaction
  • User dashboard for detailed usage and consumption analysis

New developments in NUDGE

  • Extension of existing smartphone and dashboard applications to support nudging

DOMX advances the flexible DR services for Natural gas consumers. A significant step will be taken through NUDGE, by introducing a new set of energy services that will be augmented with nudging feature additions for the smartphone application. The aim is to improve the resulting efficiency and promote user participation in flexibility services, by taking a step further than offering solely financial incentives. NUDGE will provide the ground for assessing the potential of improving participation of consumers in DR in general and more specifically in the under addressed energy vector of natural gas. Direct interaction with a collaborating energy supplier about pilot results will also provide for broader replication of this unique nudge-assisted DR approach for gas consumers.

The successful installation of DOMX retrofitting equipment will enable 100 legacy boilers of households spread across 5 different cities in Greece, to provide both fine-grained heating control as well as natural gas consumption evaluation. Among the population of the 100 participating households, half of them will use the currently available smartphone and dashboard applications (control group), while the rest of the population will sequentially receive updated application versions implementing the different nudging interventions (intervention group). Data collected from the heating system (heating system temp, consumption, etc.), along with user settings (target temp, heating curve, etc.) and feedback (e.g. adoption of interventions) gathered through the user interfaces for both groups, will constitute the dataset employed for evaluating the efficiency improvement and behaviour change of participating consumers.

Other Pilots