Home Energy Monitoring

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Technology Thursday

Energy is on everyone's minds these days, with hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, the daily news forces us to confront, even if momentarily, the implications of society's appetite for energy. And upon that confrontation, many people--not all, unfortunately, but many--wonder what they can possibly due to help. I think it's an open question as to whether individual efforts (recycling, biking to work, re-using aluminum foil, or what have you) are actually where pressure should be applied. My instinct is that the right kinds of incentives or pressure on the major corporate polluters would have a much greater impact than all the blue recycling bins in all the land, but that analysis is not for today. And people do want to help.

One thing individuals can do is to try to reduce energy consumption in the home.

There are two ways to think about this problem -- one is to reduce overall energy consumption. You can get a sense of your overall consumption by looking at your monthly bill and there are various well-documented strategies (install better light bulbs, turn the AC a couple of degrees warmer, turn the hot water heater a couple of degrees cooler and so on). Those will help. But in a future that will probably include some form of smart grid, knowing a bit more detail about where and when energy is consumed in one's home can help. If your area, for example, were to start adjusting pricing based on peak load (or face rolling brownouts) -- a not completely implausible scenario -- then knowing what was consuming the most energy and making sure not to use those things during peak times would be helpful. More data about the energy used in your home could also alert you to extremely inefficient appliances or to energy leaks.

Fortunately, researchers are investigating how we might monitor and report on energy usage in the home. A few year's back, the thinking was that some sort of sensor might need to be placed at every outlet. But that's a pain and expensive. Engineers at the University of Washington developed a device that plugs into one place in the house and can monitor the energy usage in the whole house in a detailed way.

Powerline Event Detection (PED) is a single plug-in sensor that monitors noise on the powerline infrastructure to detect and classify appliance-level events in real time in the home.

They're working on similar things for water and gas usage in the home. A related project at Georgia Tech is called the Aware Home Initiative:

The Aware Home Research Initiative at Georgia Institute of Technology is devoted to the multidisciplinary exploration of emerging technologies and services based in the home. Starting in 1998, our collection of faculty and students has created a unique research facility that allows us to simulate and evaluate user experiences with off-the-shelf and state-of-the-art technologies. With specific expertise in health, education, entertainment and usable security, we are able to apply our research to problems of significant social and economic impact.

New technologies show great promise when applied to the home domain. The opportunities are vast, ranging from new modes of entertainment, services to simplify the management of the home and its myriad activities, and much-needed assistance for individuals at risk and the busy family members who care for them.

These or other similar technologies are likely to become more widespread and eventually reach consumers on a large scale, I suspect. The "smart home" has been long promised, but with the gulf crisis highlighting the looming energy crisis, smart grids and smart homes may not be entertaining ideas, they may be necessities.