Paper Info
Title
The design and evaluation of an end-user-deployable, whole house, contactless power consumption sensor
Abstract
We present the design, development, and evaluation of an end-user installable, whole house power consumption sensing system capable of gathering accurate real-time power use that does not require installing a current transformer around the electrical feeds in a home. Rather, our sensor system offers contactless operation by simply placing it on the outside of the breaker panel in a home. Although there are a number of existing commercial systems for gathering energy use in a home, almost none can easily and safely be installed by a homeowner (especially for homes in the U.S.). Our approach leverages advances in magnetoresistive materials and circuit design to allow contactless operation by reliably sensing the magnetic field induced by the 60 Hz current and a closed loop circuit allows us to precisely infer the power consumption in real-time. The contribution of this work is an enabling technology for researchers in the fields of Ubiquitous Computing and Human-Computer Interaction wanting to conduct practical large-scale deployments of end-user-deployable energy monitoring applications. We discuss the technical details, the iterative design, and end-user evaluations of our sensing approach.
Year
DOI
Venue
2010
10.1145/1753326.1753700
CHI
Keywords
Field
DocType
closed loop circuit,iterative design,commercial system,circuit design,current transformer,whole house power consumption,accurate real-time power use,power consumption,contactless power consumption sensor,approach leverages advance,contactless operation,ubiquitous computing,sustainability,real time,human computer interaction,magnetic field,smart home
Current transformer,End user,Computer science,Installation,Circuit design,Home automation,Circuit breaker,Human–computer interaction,Iterative design,Ubiquitous computing,Electrical engineering,Embedded system
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
32
3.39
7
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Shwetak N. Patel12967211.74
Sidhant Gupta297252.23
Matthew S. Reynolds354346.32