Co-Living and behaviour-related resource consumption

Abstract

One of the strong reasons for converting to renewable energy sources is the increasing amount of resource usage, with the goal to reduce the climate impact of it. The electricity usage is expected to rise from today’s 140 TWh to 190 TWh until year 2045 in Sweden. With this, the concept of Co- Living is now being established on the housing market. The concept is based on people sharing an accommodation.

In this study, obtained data from a testbed called Live-In Lab was investigated. The data is obtained from different building configurations of accommodations, where the first one is single households and the last one is Co-Living.

The purpose of this study was to examine the resident’s behavioral changes that affected the resource usage, to see if there were differences between the different configurations. The examined resources were electricity and water.

The study was conducted by examining data for electricity and water usage, also usage time and activations for shower and basin. Data was collected for periods of three months and there were four tenants in each configuration.

The results show that the usage, per person, of electricity increased by 12,5%, and water by 56% in 2021. Noticeable was also that the number of activations, per person, for shower and basin increased by 41%. Lastly the usage time for shower and basin increased by 132% per person.

The conclusion for this study is that there is a noticeable increase of resource usage in the investigated Co-Living, comparing with single households. But there is a great uncertainty regarding Co-Living being the main reason for this difference, as Covid-19, for example, also has had a strong impact on resource usage.

Anund Baltiswiler & Mirella Vera 

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