Instrumentation for Cooking Pattern Analysis in Peri-Urban Nepal

Abstract

Clean Cooking is essential to maintain a healthy lifestyle. However, many people in developing economies do not have access to clean cooking. To promote clean cooking, first, we need to understand the cooking patterns in the household, and second, design interventions over those patterns. We also need to understand the grid and power supply readiness to support electricity-based clean cooking initiatives. In this paper, we provide an affordable and scalable energy monitoring system solution to instrument the cooking pattern in peri-urban Nepal. Our design consists of off-the-shelf power meters, minor changes in sockets/wiring at homes, data upload using cellular radio, and standard dashboard and analysis in the cloud. We deployed the system in 35 households in peri-urban Nepal and collected data from early August until the middle of October 2019. Our preliminary study indicates: 1) Cellular data access is a viable way to upload instrumentation data to the Internet in studies of this nature. 2) Data integrity and reliability are closely coupled with user behaviors and cellular reliability. 3) Deployment can be centralized instead of distributed, and cost can be affordable. 4) Continuous data collection from about three months shows poor power quality in the area.