Non-Invasive and cost effective monitoring of energy consumption patterns for electrical equipment.
Neil Brown, Andrew John Wright · 2008
Electricity use in many buildings is increasing, sometimes such that new buildings built to modern standards can have greater energy usage than their predecessors. A major cause is increased use of appliances such as computer equipment, lighting, and electronics. Increasing standby power consumption and more appliances being left running unnecessarily, compounds these effects. Monitoring equipment should provide insights into these issues, but the few systems currently available are either expensive, invasive, or both. This paper shows a case study where temperature monitoring was used to reduce industrial plant usage, and shows a method of electrical appliance monitoring, using very low cost sensors. Results show that the method can effectively reveal equipment usage patterns. Nomenclature b filter coefficients (unitless) Ts standby temperature (oC) Gt temperature gradient (unitless) Z z transform operator (unitless) H filter transfer function (unitless) CT current transformer N filter order (unitless) LDR light dependent resistor Ta ambient temperature (oC) OCR optical character recognition To max. operating temperature (oC) OMR optical meter reader Tp instantaneous temperature (oC)