Abstract Environmental and energy management in contemporary urban environments and at a household level, requires for the design of systems that will be able to integrate remote and spatially distributed monitoring data, while being open, modular, flexible and low cost. In addition, technological and industrial deregulation result in shifting from services that are heavily dependent on existing information infrastructure to services that depend on the satisfaction of instant information needs at a customer level. This paper presents methods suitable for the design and development of a hierarchical system for communicating and archiving environmental and energy data, towards serving applications that require easy and instant access to these data. The aim is to provide services at a household level for consumers ready to adopt the features of e-services to their home.