I personally would love to know where my energy goes. Of course, I'd resent a little bit being spied on... I noticed that, when pointed out, I can easily perform small actions to try to improve. I even changed the way I tie my laces (tho I understand this isn't precisely not very environmentally useful) http://www.waitless.org :)

But for the sake of discussion about this survey, shouldn't this be done with averages in mind? Some lucky ones on the map are maybe on holidays or something and some red ones on a occasional energy rampage (like spring cleaning, removing wall paper with steam or what else). Not to mention restaurants, turkish baths...

Pretty unfair and quite useless if not done over a period of time which doesn't seem to be the case here.

Yeah, I agree. There are days when I use almost no energy at all, and other days when I go on a total rampage ...

That waitless.org site is pretty excellent, by the way!

Like gemp above, as I was looking through the Haringey website I was thinking that the the deep blue rating meant that a house was likely empty-- either the resident was gone or the house was vacant. And this would be a good way for a burgular to identify houses to target.

If survey information were published for other cities, it might be safer to list only houses below a certain waste heat rating as one color or to include results over an entire previous winter.

Great point!

There is something fishy about that map, I have to say. My baseball club (London Mets) field in Finsbury Park has a derelict building in one corner which is shown as generating the highest level of heat loss (only if it was on fire!) and our totally unheated clubhouse also shows as on the high end. Meanwhile, the McDonalds and Sainsburys Superstores down the road show heat loss at the lowest end of the scale. I can only think that this down to the heat from the sun being stored in the roof tiles of our club buildings - which would tend to make these maps rather difficult to interpret.

And yes, we do play baseball in London - our men's team won the National Championships yesterday!

Congratulations!

And hey, it's super cool to hear from someone who actually lives in the neighborhood! What did local people say when the council released the map?

Haringey, to clarify, is simply one of the many boroughs of London (it's in the north part.) I live in it, near the Haringey-Barnet 'border.'

In any case, I KNOW my flat leaks heat like nobody's business. We have single-glazed windows (I'm Canadian originally, that concept doesn't even -exist- in my head), and when the temperature hovers around zero in the winter, you -notice-.

We rent - and if this survey could shame my landlord into improving the efficiency of this place, that would be amazing, so I'm pretty much all for it in this case.

The UK has a surveillance culture anyway, this is surprisingly un-intrusive compared to the other methods of spying the various levels of government undertake upon citizens in the name of just about anything.

How much energy does a "spy plane" use? :)

digital_blue: Heh, yes, no word if they purchased carbon credits for the job, eh?

marooned: Single-glazed windows in a London winter -- egad! I'm Canadian too ... lived in a single-glazed apartment one winter in Toronto in 1996, and when I woke up I could see my breath. To instal these lovely, full-floor-length, wall-to-ceiling windows, the landlord had removed the radiator and replaced it with electric space heaters on the far wall. One month of those electricity-chewing devices cost about $300, so we turned them off and wore, like, NINE SWEATERS each. I've been warmer in a *tent* in December.

Quick note to say really interesting article as always Clive - you seem to have an interesting (and niche) knack of combining technology and psychology. I was inspired to write a short piece with some other examples of data visualisation used to make statements, it's up at http://window.org.nz/ if you or your readers were interested.

Hey, you've got some really awesome art projects on your blog ... thanks for the link!