Automating Energy Management in Green Homes Nilanjan Banerjee∗ Sami Rollins∗ Kevin Moran University of Arkansas University of San Francisco University of San Francisco Fayetteville, AR San Francisco, CA San Francisco, CA
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT proved in recent years. We spoke to one user who in- Green homes powered fully or partially by renewable sources stalled solar panels at his home in 2002 and who, in order such as solar are becoming more widely adopted, however to log the performance of the system, manually recorded energy management strategies in these environments are lack- readings from a control panel on a daily basis over a ing. This paper presents the first results of a study that ex- period of several months. Another user, however, who plores home automation techniques for achieving better uti- is in the process of installing solar panels, reports that lization of energy generated by renewable technologies. First, he will have access to a web-based service that reports using a network of off-the-shelf sensing devices, we observe overall energy generation and consumption at his home. that energy generation and consumption in an off-grid home There has also been a significant increase in the number is both variable and predictable. Moreover, we find that re- of devices, such as the WattsUpMeter [11], that allow active energy management techniques are insufficient to pre- monitoring of power consumption, as well as services vent critical battery situations. We then present a recommen- such as Google PowerMeter [3, 6, 9] that provide users dation based system for helping users to achieve better uti- with convenient access to such information.