It's Different: Insights into home energy consumption in India

Abstract

Residential buildings contribute significantly to the overall energy usage across the world. Real deployments, and collected data thereof, play a critical role in providing insights into home energy consumption and occupant behavior. Existing datasets from real residential deployments are all from the developed countries. Developing countries, such as India, present unique opportunities to evaluate the scalability of existing research in diverse settings. Building upon more than a year of experience in sensor network deployments, we undertake an extensive deployment in a three storey home in Delhi, spanning 73 days from May-August 2013, measuring electrical, water and ambient parameters. We used 33 sensors across the home, measuring these parameters, collecting a total of approx. 400 MB of data daily. We discuss the architectural implications on the deployment systems that can be used for monitoring and control in the context of developing countries. Addressing the unreliability of electrical grid and internet in such settings, we present Sense Local-store Upload architecture for robust data collection. While providing several unique aspects, our deployment further validates the common considerations from similar residential deployments, discussed previously in the literature. We also release our collected data- Indian data for Ambient Water and Electricity Sensing (iAWE), for public use.