IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Fall 2014 - 74

Total
Your Electricity

Your Gas
Community Electricity
April Newsletter

29 Apr 2013<< Tuesday 30 April 2013 >> The Feature

Final Survey

Fig. 2. Interactive interface presented to the trial participant.

■■

A monitor to track the total
electricity consumption.

Average
Monthly Consumption (kWh)

All of the above mentioned
devices were equipped with an
in-built Zigbee radio, except for
the Gas meter+OCR combination,
which had to be augmented with an
external radio unit. Each radio unit
reported the readings on a 1-min
timescale to the Zigbee gateway
located in the dwelling shown in
Fig. 1. The gateway transports the
measurements through a secure
tunnelling device, in the dwelling,
to the remote data collection server
over the consumer's broadband connection. This transmission occurs
every time a request from the server
is received. The frequency, set to
once every minute, is configurable
to a desirable time granularity. As

mentioned above, the infrastructure was installed in council houses
comprising of both terraced houses
and apartments located in different
parts of the city. In the context of
the terraced houses, gas is typically
used for heating, cooking, and providing domestic hot water, while
electricity is used for all other purposes in the dwelling. Thus, both
gas and electricity consumption
was recorded. The apartments, on
the other hand, do not have a gas
supply. Only electricity is typically
supplied under an 'Economy 7'
tariff, which comprises peak and
off-peak periods. Thus, the consumption was recorded for both the
peak and off-peak usage. Peak electricity is used throughout the day
for non-heating consumption such
as cooking, lighting, hot water,

other devices etc. Off-peak electricity tariffs operate at night, for
seven hours, and this source is used
solely to power the storage heaters
that are the main source of heating
in these flats. Some of the flats do
have other electric heaters, which
are powered from the peak supply.
Participants agreeing to sign up
for the trial, and willing to provide
fine-grained energy consumption
data were provided a broadband
connection. The broadband connection was paid for for the duration of the trial, if the participant
did not already have one. A tablet
was also provided to participants as
an incentive for participation. The
other main objective of introducing the tablet was to engage participants in the process by enabling
them to track their consumption, as
the tablet served as an interactive
In-Home Display (IHD).

Data Collection and
ICT Interventions
Baseline and Missing Data
Availability of baseline data is
paramount in order to evaluate the
effectiveness of any intervention.
A natural approach would be to
use billing information prior to the
trial, e.g., from the monthly bills
of the participants to ascertain the
baseline. However, this proved to
be difficult in the context of this
study because the utility providers
supplied at best only quarterly bills

900
800
700

Average Before
Average After

600
500
400
300
200
100
0

1 2 3 4 5 6 8 10 13 15 16 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 26 27 28 31 32 33 36 38 39 40 42 51 52 53 55
Dwelling Id

Fig. 3. Average monthly non-heating electricity consumption (terraced houses).
74

IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

FALL 2014

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