HP Labs researchers explore ways to unlock insights about home energy use

[#1]

What simple changes could you make to reduce the energy you use in your home? Are your efforts to turn off the lights when you leave a room making a dent in your electricity bill and carbon footprint? Would it truly be “greener” to replace that old dishwasher with a more efficient model or to do your dishes by hand?

At today’s Unlocking Your Energy event in San Francisco, Chandrakant Patel, HP Senior Fellow and director of HP Labs’ Sustainable Ecosystems Research Group, will discuss a pilot research project underway that could one day make it easier to answer these questions.

Researchers in HP Labs have designed and deployed a proof of concept for a Home Energy Intelligence Service for remote monitoring and assessment of residential energy consumption patterns. The system combines a simple user interface with cutting-edge data mining and analytics to help identify patterns and provide insights on where energy consumption is taking place and what homeowners can do in response.

At the Service Research and Innovation Institute (SRII) Global Conference 2011 this week, the researchers will present a paper describing the project, the challenges they are tackling (like finding ways to use fewer sensors for highly accurate monitoring, and to pull info about different resources like water, gas and electricity into one view), and what they’ve learned from testing out this system in Bay Area homes over the past year.

The team’s goal is to turn the discovery of a home’s current usage patterns into a compelling experience that leads to energy savings with an aggressive payback for the investment.

You can read more news from the Unlocking Your Energy event here and check out a demo of the home energy management service below.

[#2]

Good idea. Would like to know more. Babu