A One Tonne Life with climate friendly technologies

One Tonne Life is a cooperation project between Vattenfall, Volvo, house manufacturer A-Hus, supermarket chain ICA and other partners. The aim is to show that it is possible to reduce our carbon footprint, and thereby our climate impact drastically, by using technology that is available today. During six months, the Lindell family has lived in a carbon-efficient house, designed by architect Gert Wingårdh solely for this project.

In the end, the family managed to reduce their carbon footprint from 7.3 tonnes per person and year to 1.5 tonnes. To reach the initial goal of one tonne proved difficult, since they all carried a “carbon rucksack” of 900 kilograms, which originated from production of the house and its peripherals.

The climate friendly technologies in the house include solar panels on the roof and walls, an EnergyWatch tool to monitor energy consumption and an electric C30 car from Volvo. The electric C30 was charged via a Home WallBox - a device developed by R&D Projects.

As a part of the E-mobility R&D programme at R&D projects, a certain number of people at Vattenfall Research & Development have worked with developing the provided technology. One of them is Roberth Hamrén, who has been the project leader and responsible for the development of the Home WallBox and its software platform. His colleague Kristinn Sigmundsson has been the lead developer for the web portal solution that is included in the WallBox.

The Home WallBox itself is a wall-mounted electric car charging outlet (standard European outlet with 230V, 16A). The box includes functionality for remote control (via internet, sms or an iPhone application) of the charging outlet and an electric meter for measuring the energy consumed for charging the car.

The web platform developed for the Home WallBox also makes it possible to add other services for information and statistics related to the household energy consumption. This is something that has been extensively utilised in the One Tonne Life project where all reference metering of electrical energy, heat and water consumption for the energy statistics published on the main OTL website have been managed by the same platform.

“The development and testing of the Home WallBox as well as the web platform have been made with the purpose of demonstrating and evaluating different charging services” says Johan Tollin, programme manager of Vattenfall E-mobility R&D. “The OTL project has been very valuable for R&D in that perspective”.
See what the web platform looks like (PDF 165 kB)