Haringey Interactive Heat Loss Map

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Permalink Reply by empyrean_aisles on September 13, 2007 at 0:23

Since I first posted about this, it seems the blogosphere has been going slightly nuts about it ... with the phrases 'spy plane' and 'military technology' being bandied about (& in many cases clearly cut-and-pasted from blog to blog). Our neighbourhood seems to be famous with blogs all over the world who see the heat map as an invasion of privacy, Big Brother-style government, political correctness gone mad etc. For example:

"...The city council of Haringey in the UK hired a spy plane to fly overhead and identify which households are wasting the most energy -- to try and shame them into turning their heat down..."
"...Britain Big Brother Spots Energy Wasters (and Wants Your DNA, Too) ..."
"...Critics described yesterday's developments as 'chilling,' and another lurch towards a 'Big Brother surveillance state.'..."
"...Thermal images of homes have been taken by a light aircraft fitted with military spy technology..."

Perhaps I'd feel differently if I was running a marijuana farm, and I do like my privacy, but I guess I am just more easily outraged about the exponentially rising temperatures of the planet than about the local authority knowing how hot my house is. And attempting to keep a lid on the former by means of the latter seems less worrying than scaremongering with this kind of overblown rhetoric. (And all this about 'spy technology' - honestly. In an age of Google Earth, CCTV and Nectar cards, when aren't we surveilled? You yield far more personal information up every time you board a plane. Which is another thing I should probably stop doing to save the planet ... so feel free to flame away!)

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Permalink Reply by John McMullan on July 17, 2008 at 23:12

Having a closer look at this... the blue buildings seem to be just the ones that are not occupied much. If I was a burglar (which I'm not BTW) I would think that this is a great device. Also the ones I know of around us that are red are actually flats. The difference between them and me is maybe that they have the heaters in their top rooms on... whereas we just let it rise up from below.

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Permalink Reply by Anette on July 18, 2008 at 9:51

...or they could have had the heating off for the day, if it's on a timer and this is taken during the day..

Seems my road's not been spied on just yet.

Not sure how I feel about this whole project, really.

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Permalink Reply by Clive Carter on July 18, 2008 at 10:07

I think that, in principle, this kind of research is needed. I think it is clever and fascinating, but these diagrams are likely to be a snapshot at one time, from one over-flight. I'd like to be proved wrong.

They might be meaningful if they were a composite, averaged over many days or weeks. Then, I suspect there would be much less variation and they would be less interesting and useful.

An occupied single story dwelling is probably going to register hotter from the air than a several-story house where the top floor happens to be unoccupied at the time of the over-flight.

A neighbour has a house marked dark blue and I'm going to ask him if he's taken any special measures to insulate!

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