Circuit-Level Load Monitoring for Household Energy Management

The first requirement for any intelligent household energy management system is to accurately measure home energy use. Whole-home energy measurement is cheap and easy to set up because it requires only one sensor where the home connects to the power grid. The collected data can provide useful information for large appliances. However, the only way to monitor smaller devices' energy use is to install an energy meter on every device. This creates a detailed picture of household energy consumption but requires much additional hardwareone meter per device in the home. An alternative, more practical, approach to monitor household energy use includes small devices by using circuit-level power measurements. Two proposed algorithms disaggregate the circuit-level data into device-level estimates. An evaluation of these algorithms produced an average error of less than 5.35 percent for each device. So, they enable the development of highly intelligent automated energy management systems.