WattShare: Detailed Energy Apportionment in Shared Living Spaces within Commercial Buildings Shailja Thakur†, Manaswi Saha†, Amarjeet Singh†, Yuvraj Agarwal‡ †Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi ‡Carnegie Mellon University †fshailja1275, manaswis,
[email protected], ‡
[email protected] Abstract ters, energy disaggregation Increasing energy consumption of commercial buildings has motivated numerous energy tracking and monitoring sys- 1 Introduction tems in the recent years. A particular area that is less Increasing electricity consumption has been an ever- explored in this domain is that of energy apportionment growing concern for the past several decades. Buildings, whereby total energy usage of a shared space such as a build- specifically commercial buildings, account for a significant ing is disaggregated to attribute it to an individual occupant. proportion of the overall energy use globally. Within com- This particular scenario of individual apportionment is im- mercial buildings, shared living spaces e.g. dormitories, ho- portant for increased transparency in the actual energy con- tels and hospitals have a peculiar feature. Occupants in these sumption of shared living spaces in commercial buildings shared living spaces typically occupy their own room but are e.g. hotels, student dormitories and hospitals amongst oth- not billed for their actual energy consumption, resulting in ers. Accurate energy accounting is a difficult problem to higher energy wastage. Even if the property owner would solve using only a single smart meter. In this paper, we want to do separate billing for each room, complex electri- present a novel, scalable and a low cost energy apportion- cal infrastructure together with high metering costs makes it ment system called WattShare that builds upon our Ener- prohibitive.