Detecting change in multivariate data is a challenging problem, especially when class labels are not available. There is a large body of research on univariate change detection, notably in control charts developed originally for engineering applications. We evaluate univariate change detection approaches —including those in the MOA framework — built into ensembles where each member observes a feature in the input space of an unsupervised change detection problem. We present a comparison between the ensemble combinations and three established ‘pure’ multivariate approaches over 96 data sets, and a case study on the KDD Cup 1999 network intrusion detection dataset. We found that ensemble combination of univariate methods consistently outperformed multivariate methods on the four experimental metrics.