Improving home energy efficiency with E2Home: A Web-based application for integrated electricity consumption and contextual information visualization

Abstract

In recent years, energy efficiency has become a relevant problem due to rising energy costs and concerns about the environment. Major corporations such as Google and Microsoft started projects to present electric energy consumption data to residents via Web applications. Notwithstanding the two corporations' backing, these two efforts have not received the expected level of interest, and are thus being discontinued. We argue that electric energy consumption data become useful only if they are presented along related data (e.g., the residents' locations) which can provide the context in which consumption occurred. This is expected to help the residents change their consumption behavior, and thus have a positive impact on the electricity generation and distribution network as well. In this paper, we present Energy-Efficient Home (E2Home), a Web-based application for the interactive visualization of electricity consumption data and contextual information. Built on top of our FuseViz framework, the E2Home application fuses (i) residents' locations from Android smartphones and (ii) electric energy consumption from the electric utility Web page into a joint data stream using MapReduce. The joint data stream is then visualized on SVG-based interactive time charts and maps on a Web page, so that the user can explore them using well-established techniques such as brush-and-linking and panning and zooming to acquire actionable information to reduce electricity consumption. Based on our experiments in a real home, the improvement on energy efficiency brought about by E2Home is expected to exceed 10%.