Dayton, Ohio – A new 2,000-square-foot, two-story home is being built inside The Helix innovation center by Emerson Climate Technologies, a business segment of Emerson. The “home inside a building” will serve as a working laboratory, enabling faster testing of the company’s future innovations in comfort, energy savings and connected home concepts. The residential connected home module, which will feature ambient controls to simulate a range of below-freezing to hot, humid weather conditions, is being constructed by Emerson as one of five modules within The Helix innovation center on the University of Dayton campus.

“We will be evaluating comfort and energy savings from every angle,” said Hung Pham, director of integrated technologies at Emerson Climate Technologies Air Conditioning business. “This home module in The Helix will allow us to change refrigerant, HVAC systems, airflow and weather to help evaluate impact on human comfort and health from the standpoint of air conditioning, heating, indoor air quality, humidity, noise, lighting and other factors.”

Emerson’s residential module will be a fully functioning and furnished home with technologies and instrumentation in place to research the comfort and energy savings performance of these systems as well as connected home technologies. It will feature three bedrooms, family room, one-and-a-half bathrooms, a kitchen with appliances, laundry room, water heater, home audio, home theater, and security, plus an attic, roof and crawl space. Emerson’s residential connected home module will contain various heating and air conditioning system types, with the ability to be easily adapted to test others. To support work on efficiency improvements, the home and HVAC systems will have separate meters to measure energy consumption.

“Consumer demands for comfort, connectivity, energy savings and environmentally-friendly features are shaping the future of this industry, while we also need to think about current and future regulatory requirements,” Pham said. “Emerson’s collaborative research with our OEM customers and other channel partners in this residential connected home module will focus on identifying current unmet needs, developing innovations for tomorrow’s needs, and improving the performance of our technology in existing applications.”

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