Title
Circulo: Saving Energy with Just-In-Time Hot Water Recirculation.
Abstract
The average home in the US flushes 1000's of gallons of water down the drain each year while standing at the fixture and waiting for hot water. Some households use a pump for hot water recirculation (HWR) to ensure that hot water is always immediately available, but these systems can incur more than $1000 per year in energy costs. In this paper, we explore the hypothesis that "just-in-time" HWR can reduce the energy footprint of HWR systems, without increasing hardware or installation costs and without increasing water waste or human annoyance. Our basic approach is to learn patterns of hot water usage in the home and to circulate hot water only when future hot water usage is highly likely. We call this approach Circulo. We evaluate Circulo by analyzing hot water usage patterns from 5 different homes over a period of 7--10 days each. Our results indicate that Circulo can reduce the energy needed for HWR by 30% while still providing households with hot water over 90% of the time.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1145/2528282.2528287
BuildSys@SenSys
Keywords
Field
DocType
just-in-time hot water recirculation,energy footprint,approach circulo,hot water usage pattern,hot water recirculation,saving energy,hwr system,future hot water usage,hot water,energy cost,water waste,hot water usage
Gallon (US),Footprint,Waste management,Engineering,Annoyance,Environmental engineering
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
8
0.57
9
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Andrew Frye180.57
Michel Goraczko2104479.03
Jie Liu3143894.17
Anindya Prodhan480.57
Kamin Whitehouse51982160.79