Residential Electricity Disaggregation: Identifying Appliance Usage Patterns

The complex modern day issues of energy and sustainability can be approached from several angles. Addressing such large scale issues requires not only large scale fixes, but also small scale solutions. One particularly interesting and promising area of small scale research involves residential energy use. In the United States, residential energy consumption represents 21% of total primary consumption, so reducing household energy use can make a big impact on a significant slice of consumption. One current obstacle in the way of energy reduction is that the average homeowner only sees the total electricity usage each month, and has no clear idea about which appliances are using how much energy or when. This lack of information makes it somewhat di cult for the homeowner to implement or quantify concrete energy-saving measures. Fortunately, knowledge of appliance-specific energy use has proven to e↵ectively increase user energy e ciency by up to 15%. The primary point of interest in this project, therefore, is to use machine