Your house is going to be thermally scanned

[SteamyTea]

How modified Teslas are decarbonising the UK's homes

 

By David Stock and Madeleine Cuff

 

Strange-looking cars have been cruising the streets of London, Liverpool, Cardiff, Glasgow, Manchester, Leeds and South Yorkshire in the UK, hunting for leaky buildings. The Built Environment Scanning System (BESS) is a modified Tesla, fitted out with extra scanners, cameras and robotics equipment so it collects data on the dimensions, heat loss, materials, age and state of dilapidation of every building it drives past.

With funding from Innovate UK, the Welsh government and the UK Space Agency, UK non-profit xRI has built two of these BESS cars. Over the course of three months in 2024, the vehicles have scanned more than 1.5 million homes.

The aim is to combine the data gathered by the BESS cars with other information, including drone and satellite imagery, to build a comprehensive database on the state of the UK’s buildings. Collating this information into an AI-powered database will help councils, housing associations and other property owners more quickly design and finance big retrofit projects, the team hopes.

New Scientist took an exclusive ride in a BESS car to find out more about this technology and how it can help the UK speed up the decarbonisation of its building stock.

 

 

[MikeSharp01]

Exciting stuff, just get them to drive round a few of the big builders estates and publish the data - lets see how they come out.

[SteamyTea]

12 minutes ago, MikeSharp01 said:

get them to drive round a few of the big builders estates and publish the data - lets see how they come out

There is a comment or two about that in the video

[Marvin]

lets see if they can work out which room my wife is in...

[joe90]

But surely it can’t detect which houses are being heated and which are not which would give different results,

[Sparrowhawk]

I'm sure they could have used something cheaper than a Tesla.

[jack]

1 hour ago, joe90 said:

But surely it can’t detect which houses are being heated and which are not which would give different results,

 

I haven't watched the video, but aggregated data can still be of use even if you don't know the details of individual homes.

 

I wonder whether they do per-house analysis. You can probably learn things by looking at (for example) the variance in temperature across the image of a house. If you have large deviations, for example, there could be cold-bridging.

[Mike]

16 hours ago, joe90 said:

But surely it can’t detect which houses are being heated and which are not which would give different results

I think this is your answer:

19 hours ago, SteamyTea said:

The aim is to combine the data gathered by the BESS cars with other information, including drone and satellite imagery

For example:

https://www.satellitevu.com/