IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Fall 2014 - 76

Eenrgy Consumption
per Day (kWh)

0.4
0.3
0.2
0.1
0

Consumption/Day

1 Temp. 1 Home Tunneling
5 Smart 1 Current 1 Pulse Humidity
Plugs
Monitor Monitor Monitor Gateway Device
0.12

6.53E-06 6.53E-06 6.53E-06

0.0576

0.12

Smart
Meters

All
Together

0.048

0.35

Fig. 7. Energy consumed by the monitoring elements in a dwelling per day.

Eenrgy Consumption
per Day (kWh)

The trial was divided into three
phases: 1) Rollout of the monitoring infrastructure and collection
of baseline data, 2) Participants
being handed a tablet computer,
which served as an interactive inhome display, and 3) A community
workshop conducted to provide
feedback to the participants. In the
rest of this article, phase 1 will be
referred to as "baseline," phase 2 as
"interface intervention," and phase 3
as "community intervention."
Fig. 2 shows a standard way in
which consumption was displayed
on the tablet. The tablet connected
to the remote data collection server
using the Internet, fetched the information of interest, and displayed the
same in a standard web browser.
Using the touch screen on the tablet,
the participants could choose to view
information such as hourly, daily,
weekly, or monthly consumption
figures, device specific consumption figures, and average figures.
This interface was later augmented
with additional web applications

as shown on the right hand side of
Fig. 2, which the participant could
launch using the touch screen. The
community electricity application, in
particular, proved to be quite popular
as it enabled the participant to compare his/her consumption against
that of similar types of dwellings
in the neighborhood. The purpose
of this exercise was to help the participant compare their energy usage
with the energy usage of others in
nearby households. This awareness
could help households better understand their consumption habits compared to others, which in turn would
hopefully lead them to identifying
opportunities that would result from
reducing their overall usage.

Findings
Having introduced the tablet intervention, and subsequently the community workshop intervention, it is
of immense interest to identify the
impact the project had on the different dwellings. The ensuing discussion elaborates on these aspects.

Analysis of Consumption
We compared the average monthly
consumption, for each dwelling
for the baseline period, to the average monthly consumption after the
intervention. Fig. 3 and Fig. 4 show
the findings for terraced houses
and apartments considered in this
study respectively. We can observe
from these figures that a decrease
in consumption was found for those
dwellings, mainly terraced houses,
whose consumption was relatively
high. For the apartments, there does
not seem to be any drastic change in
the overall consumption. For most
dwellings with a footprint is 200-
400 kWh/month or lower, there was
little or no decrease in consumption.
This could potentially be attributed to the consumption initially
being low when the project began,
which hardly allowed for further
reductions. For some dwellings,
an increase in consumption was
observed. To better understand this
behavior, we compared the consumption figures in the dwellings

50
40
30
20
10
0

Consumption

1 Home

100 Homes

Server Side

All Together

0.345619596

34.56195955

43.90757915

Fig. 8. Energy consumed by the whole monitoring infrastructure per day.
76

IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

FALL 2014

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Fall 2014