Smart home energy management

This project focuses on development of algorithms and software to achieve effective and efficient power management in a fully instrumented smart home. The goals of the project are to reduce energy costs by reducing overall power consumption and load leveling, while maintaining an acceptable level of user comfort. While it is trivially obvious that a reduction in overall power consumption will reduce energy costs, the cost savings to be realized through load leveling are perhaps less so. Load leveling provides energy cost savings by reducing the cost per unit energy. Whatever energy management techniques are implemented, they must perform their tasks with minimal inconvenience to the user. Thus parameters of interest to this project include not only power consumption data but also metrics related to user satisfaction. This paper details ongoing work to gather data and develop these algorithms and implementations utilizing the smart home laboratory and control and interface software that has already been developed as a part of this project. Development of this software, which is currently in use, is an integral part of this project and is described in detail in this paper.