Insert-coin: turning the household into a prepaid billing system

Abstract

Energy awareness is the ability to perceive the role of energy in daily activities. We combine appliance-level consumption information with prepaid billing so as to turn appliances in pay-as-you-go devices. We expect a greater awareness of energy available and demand to arise from the interaction with such a system. In this paper, we introduce the key principles of pay-as-you-go devices and report about the implementation of this strategy as an energy management system consisting of a cloud-based webservice and a mobile application.