Remotely: A Home Energy Score App

The proposed Remotely app uses smartphone technology to facilitate Home Energy Score data collection by an energy professional or the homeowner. We believe Remotely can lower the cost of a Home Energy Score and lower barriers to efficiency program adoption. To meet ambitious climate goals, the majority of US homes will need to be targeted for efficiency improvements and electrification. This requires innovative and cost effective approaches to energy auditing and program documentation. The Remotely app combines:information on energy systems collected via touch screens;images of key energy characteristics of the home taken with the phone’s camera;estimates of the home’s finished square feet, window and wall sizes, ceiling height calculated with augmented reality algorithms and phone based data collection. This data is validated by a certified home energy professional before generating a Home Energy Score. This Phase II project has three primary objectives:Expanding the app as a result of user feedback, including expanding across operating systems, adding multilingual interfaces, and more logical sequencing;Addressing limitations found in internal app testing, including improved overhead testing and adding window measurement algorithms Collect additional data with three objectives: facilitate electrification by collecting data for electrification checklists; collect data to facilitate IRA/BIL compliance; apply Remotely to use for code compliance with remote virtual inspections. Facilitate load calculations for system sizing, notably of air source heat pumps;Facilitate documentation of the systems installed with OCR reading of decoding of system serial numbers. A key goal of this project is to demonstrate that Remotely shortens data collection time and provides greater traceability and documentation of the model assumptions.