Abstract The Trondheim living lab is a newly built detached single family home that is planned to reach a zero emission balance over the course of its lifetime. This is achieved by a broad variety of technical strategies such as passive and active energy design and efficient installations. The degree of automation of the building's environmental services (such as heating, cooling, ventilation, and light) has been left open to be able to test different control scenarios: manual, automatic and several modes combining both approaches. In the first wave of qualitative experiments conducted in the laboratory between September 2015 and March…