Boston Heating Systems

To help reduce building-related greenhouse gas emissions, BCAN conducts targeted outreach to residents and property owners who have the greatest potential to reduce energy use. A critical first step in this effort is identifying what type of heating fuel or energy source each building uses, since heating systems are a major driver of emissions. Currently, there is no centralized public dataset that clearly identifies the heating fuel used by individual buildings in Boston. However, several publicly available datasets contain partial or complementary information that, when combined, can be used to infer or predict a building’s heating system. These include the Boston Tax Assessment Database, which contains building-level heating type information, siding, roofing, and construction dates, and the City of Boston Approved Building Permits, which include records of heating system installations and upgrades. This project aims to integrate and reconcile these datasets to infer the most likely heating system used by each building. For buildings with missing or incomplete information, we will use overlapping attributes across datasets to estimate the heating system type using the predictive logic provided below.