Zero Energy House

Data-driven comfort

The Zero Energy House (ZEH) is an exemplar Open Source residential building in Auckland, New Zealand. The owners wanted a home that was warm, healthy, and low cost to live in. The story of the project was told through a website, videos, and live data with the aim of inspiring and enabling others to build better homes.

The live performance data from the house’s control and monitoring system needed to be incorporated into the project’s website and other media. Many cloud-based data logging solutions were tested, but none provided the ability to flexibly use and share the data coming from the home.

The challenge

  • integrate with the Loxone smart home platform to publish data into SolarNetwork
  • integrate data feeds from SolarNetwork into the ZEH website

The result

After a number of false starts, we finally have access to a platform that allows us to aggregate our data and use it as a tool to tell the story of how a modern home can look after its occupants.

Shay Brazier, ZEH owner
  • Evident, the business that started off the back of the ZEH project, funded the development of a SolarNetwork plugin to capture data from Loxone; released as open source
  • Live data is now available on the ZEH website.
  • The success at the ZEH project lead to the further “zero energy” project work in New Zealand.

ZEH data visualization