Challenges in resource monitoring for residential spaces

Abstract

Buildings consume approximately 73% of the total electrical energy, and 12% of the potable water resources 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 synchronous water and electricity usage over 3 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 while monitoring a household's resource consumption at high time resolution, a problem that could easily hamper the successful adaptation of these technologies.