I see London, I see France, I see Belgium's underpants.
Last winter, a little airplane outfitted with a special infrared scanner flew over buildings throughout the country and produced images that show which homes are well-insulted and which ones are going commando.
The resulting images are now publicly available online.
The Belgian government's "Zoom Into Your Roof" online project aims to show homeowners how their houses stack up in terms of insulation. By searching for their address, residents can zoom in to see if heat, represented in dark red, is escaping from the house. According to Andrew Vande Moere, senior lecturer of design at the University of Sydney, residents can learn more about how their rooftops are performing by answering questions on the map site.
Here in the States, the experts who conduct home energy audits now often have fancy schmancy infrared guns that show where insulation is lacking, but as far as I know there's no equivalent of the Dutch rooftop mapping site. While Google does use infrared data, it actually comes from the opposite direction. The Google Sky application incorporates sky views from the Infrared Astronomical Satellite to help researchers.
Moere calls Zoom Into Your Roof "the largest thermographic map currently available online." Unfortunately, the whole Belgian site is in Flash, foiling my attempts to translate it. If your Dutch is good and you'd like to stop thinking about the World Cup final, this map might be the perfect distraction. From what I can tell, there are customizable options that include a function at the top right with a slider from pure infrared imagery to pure satellite imagery.
One drawback to the infrared approach is its potential to reveal some pretty private aspects of our homes, like that roof party that probably wasn't allowed. As Technology Review's Tom Simonite points out, "Some people may not like others to see any sign of what they are doing in the privacy of their own home. Outdated information may concern others."
Still, I think the benefits of making this kind of information visual could be enormous. Suddenly it's an energy efficiency competition that ultimately drives down electricity use. Besides, I'm sure that with a few programming tweaks, our privacy could be protected by not allowing the zoom to go in too far and adding some blurring similar to what Google Maps does now.
When it comes to home energy efficiency, let's not get caught with our pants down.
Image: Infrared screenshot of Antwerp from the Belgian government's online energy project. Credit: Zoom Into Your Roof.
Tags: Buildings and Structures, Electricity, Energy Efficiency, Green Building, Green Tech
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