Most households have no way of monitoring how much electricity is being consumed; however, researchers in Pittsburgh believe a new monitoring system may soon be available for residential use. The research is published in a special issue of Yale’s Journal of Industrial Ecology on environmental applications of information and communication technology sponsored by CSC’s Leading Edge Forum.
“There are many opportunities for reducing electricity consumption in buildings, but identifying and quantifying them is often very difficult, particularly in single-family homes,” said Dr Mario Berges from Carnegie Mellon University. “This means that for most residents the only indicator of consumption they have is their monthly electricity bill.”
Dr Berges’s team analysed non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM), a novel technique for deducing the power consumption and operational schedule of individual loads in a building from measurements of the overall voltage and current feeding it.
NILM uses a single whole-house meter, connected to software in an embedded device or computer to provide appliance-level energy metering. The system monitors the signals on electrical wires, and then uses signal processing and machine-learning algorithms to identify which device caused the change in electricity use, matching it against a library of known signatures from different devices.
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