Building Instrumentation
Why it matters
The building industry runs on claims: rated COPs, promised U-values, simulated yields. Only a few measure what a building actually does afterwards. The same design mistakes therefore replicate for decades. The few public examples stand out for it: the open Building Data Genome Project pooled two years of hourly readings from over three thousand meters across 1,636 buildings. The dataset is valued precisely because collecting and publishing a building's real readings is still the exception, not the rule. Instrumentation is the difference between believing a building and knowing it. Sensors turn walls, systems, and seasons into data that can confirm, refute, and teach. For 001 this is close to a definition of identity. Our manifesto's first principle is "test, don't theorize," and a hypothesis can only meet physical reality if something is there to record the encounter. Measured autonomy windows, seasonal consumption, failed experiments — every honest number in this knowledge base exists because a sensor was installed before the claim.
Role in 001's holistic picture
Instrumentation is the measurement layer of the living-lab method: without instruments an inhabited building produces anecdote, not evidence. Its data feeds energy management in real time and watches over Indoor Environmental Quality. The same data accumulates into the evidence LCA and our maturity badges demand, and it is the ground truth a digital twin is built from. Without it, "validated" would be a word instead of a tier.
How 001 engages with it
House 001 is where the numbers this catalog cites come from: seasonal electricity off its meters, the winter autonomy window, the 2025 water program, the itemized CO₂ ledger. House 001 is honest about how each was produced: some are direct readings, others are computed from readings with the assumptions stated. The sharpest of those assumptions is also the page's point: the COP of the DIY heat pump is still an engineering estimate, not a metered fact. Closing that gap is scheduled instrumentation work rather than an open question.
At Unity Hub monitoring is designed in from the first drawing rather than retrofitted. The reason is 001's consortium role: to hand over monitoring-ready systems and the evidence they produce. Concretely, that stack is Home Assistant running locally on the building's own server; demand-controlled ventilation driven by CO₂; in-wall temperature and humidity sensors contributed by the Institute of Engineering Thermophysics, a consortium partner; CT-clamp energy monitoring on every power line, read in Home Assistant; and per-roof solar yield straight from the MPPT charge controllers' own telemetry. Sensor points follow a wired-first rule: powered cable runs, with Zigbee left for the spots a cable genuinely cannot reach. This is what "designed" instrumentation means in practice: sensor placement decided together with the building, and an open, local platform chosen so the data outlives any vendor.
Maturity: applied. Practiced at House 001 at meter-and-ledger level, with the unmetered gaps named; designed into Unity Hub's deliverables by role.
Further reading
- House 001 — the prototype whose meters and ledgers this catalog cites
- UA Unity Hub — monitoring as consortium deliverable
- Home Assistant — the open, local-first platform 001's monitoring runs on (an Open Home Foundation project)
- Building Data Genome Project — an open dataset of hourly meter readings from 1,636 buildings