Atamate Blog

Passive cooling methods keep the temperature inside a building comfortable without using energy-hungry air-conditioning, fans or heat pumps. Cooling is needed during the summer, when air temperatures get uncomfortably high, but also at cooler times because electronic devices and simple human metabolism can make a...

Standards for space heaters are governed by several European Union standards that remain in place in Britain including Regulation 2015/1188, often called Lot 20, which sets minimum standards for energy efficiency and emissions that all heaters powered by electricity, gas or oil must meet.

Air quality is impacted by carbon dioxide, volatile organic compounds, nitrogen oxides and humidity. Good air quality management has many benefits:

Mechanical ventilation with heat recovery (MVHR) extracts heat energy from exhaust air. However, it carries a high capital cost and case studies revealed that many systems are incorrectly designed and operated. In the mild climate of most of the British Isles, more efficient options are available at lower cost.

Recommendations for promoting workplace health and wellbeing often include monitoring the indoor environment using wearable sensors. Our view is that a fixed sensor network is a better option as it records more parameters, does not depend on who is wearing what sensor and is less intrusive.

The winter vomiting bug is caused by the norovirus which spreads rapidly through aerosols and surfaces, survives for days or weeks between human hosts and is resistant to ammonia and alcohol-based cleaning products. We suggest that ultraviolet could be used to control its spread, especially public toilets and...

Yongchao Huang's recent paper describes Atamate's latest progress in machine learning for the smart home. A set of calculations allows a smart building to quantify the influences of various ambient conditions on the temperature of a room and use them to control a radiator.

Kat Kelly recently showed that rented flats using variable ventilation and direct electrical heating under Atamate smart control delivered better energy efficiency than predicted for heat pump-based systems. We argue that the data shows that automation has been under-valued in planned reforms to the UK building...

The 200 common cold viruses are more prevalent in the British winter. That's mainly because indoor relative humidity drops below the comfort threshold of 40%, making it easier for them to infect. Being infected with one makes us more vulnerable to others, enhancing the misery of the winter 'flu season'.

Modernist architecture in the early 20^th century adopted the Licht und Luft principle, maximising light and ventilation to combat tuberculosis. Amid another airborne disease pandemic, the same principles apply: the ultraviolet component of sunlight kills viruses and good ventilation is an established approach to...