Dear reader,
Time flies and after four intensive years of work, eTEACHER is coming to an end! A lot has happened in the past few months, and we have continued working on the demonstration of eTEACHER solutions in our 12 pilot buildings. Close supervision of the monitoring and the ICT tools allowed us to fix issues quickly and reduce their impact. Most frequent maintenance work involved replacing batteries, repairing sensors with gateways, and resetting sensors. In addition, as a result of the tool developed within the project, a paper was accepted at the 2021 European Conference on Computing in Construction.
On the 14th and 15th of April, we hold our second External Advisory Board, where we showed the experts how the eTEACHER App works and gave them time to check all the different features. Their feedback helped us a lot while planning the exploitation of our key results. In general, they thought that “the idea of the app is great, it builds energy literacy and teaches people to be sensitive to energy consumption, helps them develop the ability to estimate their consumption and the energy effects of their decisions”. There was also a concern to keep the engagement with the app in the long term. For the application to be widely used, it should be very easy to use for as many people as possible. Thus, simplifying the appearance without really reducing the features would increase the audience in the long term.
In this last period of the project, we have also worked intensively in defining our Key Exploitable Results (KERs). You can learn more about our KERs by downloading our factsheet.
Our social experts held the last Feedback Forum to gather user’s feedback to help us understand better what works and what does not work, and they have presented their findings at the Energy Evaluation Europe 2021 conference. In addition, we persisted in our commitment to increasing users’ engagement with the eTEACHER tools and prepared a webinar to show users some initial results of their energy savings, improved indoor conditions and behaviour change achieved. The webinar took place on the 20th of April for the Spanish pilots and on the 16th of June for the Romanian pilots.
On the 8th of June, we participated in the webinar “Communication best-practices to boost the “Zero Pollution Ambition” with the presentation titled “Behavioural change towards energy efficiency by using ICT tools: the eTEACHER case study”. Likewise, we presented the main challenges and lessons learnt during the eTEACHER project at the SmartBuilt4EU Webinar: “Meet EU Innovators” on the 17th of June.
Finally, on the 30th of June, we held the eTEACHER final conference. The recording is included in this newsletter. The conference explored the world of energy-saving apps and presented the methodology used and the energy toolkit developed. The speakers provided suggestions to policymakers to incentivise behavioural change and shared lessons learnt by several H2020 energy projects: NRG2peers, FEEDBACK, ebalance plus, NUDGE and Triple-A-Reno.
Remember that improving your energy behaviour is possible, easy and beneficial thanks to ICT. Start now by checking out our eTEACHER App Quick Start Guide and navigating through our demo building to see the different features!
Let me thank you once again for your interest in our project.
Enjoy your reading!
Dr. Gloria Calleja-Rodríguezo
eTEACHER coordinator
How do I get people to change their habits? This is one of the challenges faced by developers of apps and ICT solutions aimed at boosting energy savings in our buildings. European researchers embraced this mission Forming attitudes is hard. It may be exciting to start a new habit, but it’s challenging to make it […]