Challenges in Resource Monitoring for Residential Spaces

In BuildSys 2009 in conjunction with ACM SenSys 2009 , 0 pages , November 2009.

NESL Technical Report #: TR-UCLA-NESL-200909-03

Buildings consume approximately 73% of the total electrical energy, and 12% of the potable water resource in the United States. Even a moderate reduction in this sector results in significant monetary and resource savings. Fine-grained resource monitoring is regarded as one technology that could help consumers and building owners to understand, and thus reduce, their resource waste. In this paper, we discuss challenges emerging from these fine grained resource monitoring systems through an empirical study of long-term monitoring data of a residential space. We collected water and electricity usage over 5 months from a single family house. Using a matched filter mechanism we detect several water and electrical events happening in the house, showing that with simple mathematical tools, these data traces reveal already a lot of information about the consumption patterns. We further discuss challenges in fine grained load monitoring using the main power meter, advocating that synchronous water and power traces help to disambiguate several power consumers. In addition, our analysis revealed interesting privacy implications occurring while monitoring a household's resource consumption at high time resolution. We discuss this problem that hampers the successful adaptation of these technologies.

• Younghun Kim
• Thomas Schmid
• Yan Wang
• Mani B Srivastava

• PDF file of paper
• PDF file of presentation

• SpotLight : Personal Natural Resource Consumption Profiler

Conference Paper