Discerning electrical and water usage by individuals in homes
Juhi Ranjan, Erin Griffiths, Kamin Whitehouse · 2014
Energy auditing and feedback is an effective and low cost technique that has the potential to save 20-50% energy in homes. Several new sensing technologies can now detect and disaggregate energy usage in homes at a fixture level, which is helpful for eco-feedback in homes. However, without disaggregating and assigning fixture energy usage to individuals (fixture assignment problem), it is hard for residents to discover individual energy saving actions. In this paper, we explore the hypothesis that fixture assignment can be performed based on coarse-grained room-level location tracking -- even when a fixture is used and multiple people are in the same room. To test this hypothesis, we perform a study with 5 groups of 2 participants each, who lived together for 7-12 days in a test home. We find that fixture assignment can be performed with an average accuracy of 87% using room-level tracking. In comparison, fixture assignment has 12% accuracy with house-level tracking (who is home vs not home) and 97% accuracy with coordinate-level tracking (who is standing at the oven vs fridge).