Home energy consumption feedback: A user survey

Abstract

Buildings account for a relevant fraction of the energy consumed by a country, up to 20-40% of the yearly energy consumption. If only electricity is considered, the fraction is even bigger, reaching around 73% of the total electricity consumption, equally divided into residential and commercial dwellings. Building and Home Automation have a potential to profoundly impact current and future buildings' energy efficiency by informing users about their current consumption patterns, by suggesting more efficient behaviors, and by pro-actively changing/modifying user actions for reducing the associated energy wastes. In this paper we investigate the capability of an automated home to automatically, and timely, inform users about energy consumption, by harvesting opinions of residential inhabitants on energy feedback interfaces. We report here the results of an on-line survey, involving nearly a thousand participants, about feedback mechanisms suggested by the research community, with the goal of understanding what feedback is felt by home inhabitants easier to understand, more likely to be used, and more effective in promoting behavior changes. Contextually, we also collect and distill users' attitude towards in-home energy displays and their preferred locations, gathering useful insights on user-driven design of more effective in-home energy displays.

Impact of eco-feedback on the behavior of campus users

“…Results showed that users preferred environmentally-friendly units (here, the equivalent number of trees required to offset CO2 emissions associated with their electricity consumption) to kilowatt-hours (kWh). This is consistent with previous studies [14,15] showing that people have a limited understanding of kWh due to its abstract nature (hard to visualize).…”

A Review of Approaches for Sensing, Understanding, and Improving Occupancy-Related Energy-Use Behaviors in Commercial Buildings

“…Ignoring this step might lead to getting worse energy-consumption behaviors. In [162][163][164], the results indicate that the occupants had a limited understanding of the goal of the feedback studies and that some occupants had a hard time understanding the used representative units. In such cases, a pre-survey could help identify the general knowledge of the targeted occupants for the feedback study and could help reveal which representative units would work better for them.…”

Modelling home electricity management for sustainability: The impact of response levels, technological deployment & occupancy

“…Although the efficiency of this method has shown to be lower [38,41], it can enhance the user's motivation to reduce their electricity consumption by up to 5% [42]. It is possible to send signals to the end-users to warn them about overconsumption; the current concept is a fix daily limit when a warning is sent once the consumption goes above the defined limit [43]. This means that warnings would always occur towards the end of the day, whilst the limit should be changing and adapting to real time variation, to make use of potential savings made throughout the day.…”