Abstract
The availability of smart metering and smart appliances enables detecting and characterising appliance use in a household, quantifying energy savings through efficient appliance use and predicting appliance-specific demand from load measurements is possible. With growing electric kettle ownership and usage, lack of any efficiency labelling guidelines for the kettle, slow technological progress in improving kettle efficiency relative to other domestic appliances, and current consumer attitudes, urgent investigation into consumer kettle usage patterns is warranted. From an efficiency point of view, little can be done about the kettle, which is more efficient than other methods of heating water such as the stove top kettle. However, since a majority households use the kettle inefficiently by overfilling, in order to meet energy targets, it is imperative to quantify inefficient usage and predict demand. For the purposes of scalability, we propose tools that depend only on load measurement data for quantifying and visualising kettle usage and energy consumption, assessing energy wastage through overfilling via our proposed electric kettle model, and predicting kettle-specific demand, from which we can estimate potential energy savings in a household and across a housing stock. This is demonstrated using data from a longitudinal study across a sample of 14 UK households for a two-year period.1The open-access REFIT Electrical Load Measurements dataset of the 14 UK households used in this study can be accessed via DOI 10.15129/31da3ece-f902-4e95-a093-e0a9536983c4.1
Highlights
An electric kettle is an electrical appliance, that has a selfcontained heating unit, for heating water, and automatically switches off when the water reaches boiling point or at a preset temperature below 100 °C
Adopting the established Adaptive Neuro Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) [18] prediction tool, we show that kettle usage and energy consumption can accurately be predicted, short- and longterm
We confirm that while individual households have predictable patterns of use, there are weekday/weekend variations as well as seasonal variations, which we attribute primarily to holidays rather than weather changes. This findings are in accordance to [22], where it was shown that the usage of three userdependent appliances does not depend on the season but is not consistent over weekends and peak times and have more variations if there are occupants working from home
Summary
An electric kettle is an electrical appliance, that has a selfcontained heating unit, for heating water, and automatically switches off when the water reaches boiling point or at a preset temperature below 100 °C. We test the above assumption of regularity in kettle usage, quantify the actual and predicted contribution of energy consumed by the kettle in a household, and propose a method to determine energy waste from load measurements only. This is supported by a longitudinal study comprising a sample of 14 UK houses, of different occupancy and age groups (e.g., retirees, working couples, families with children and single occupants), some energy conscious and others not.
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