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Introduction


Energy consumption of mankind is enormous. Since sources of power are limited or depletable, it means slow exhaustion of the planet. Reserves of oil will exhaust after 45 years, gas after 70 and coal after 250 years [Mémento sur l'energie /Energie Data Book, CEA, Edition 2002, p. 38]. In addition with energy transformations (coal power plants, engines etc.), which are not generally friendly to environment, this means serious issue for people to solve. There is 51 percent of energy producing in coal power plants in USA. On the other hand, it is no surprise that in many cases the energy is used non-effectively. Up to 10 percent of produced energy is wasted in power grid. Electric energy consumption is various in every country. For comparison an average European household burns up to 4667kWh, household in USA in the same period burns up to 11209kWh. To make a contribution to the world preservation, we need “only” to detect such situations and find proper action to solve it (from simple switching the light off to developing more advanced production techniques). Energy Consumption Manager (ECM) is a system, which focuses on this in the milieu of our households, since they spend significant amount of energy. 

Our success


  • 2. place Imagine cup 2008 France

  • 1. place ACM SRC 2008 Praha

  • Innovation accelerator 2008 France

  • Special award - Head of the year 2008 Bratislava

  • 1. place IIT.SRC 2008 Bratislava

 

System overview


Our intention lies in detailed monitoring of electric energy consumption in a household, based on measuring of expenditure of each appliance, at the beginning not necessary all, but mainly “important” ones. Measuring is done by devices plugged between power source and appliance. Data are transferred wirelessly and collected at central antenna 24 hours-a-day and 7 days-a-week. Then they are passed to ECM Application (ECMA) that runs on home PC. ECMA analyzes received data, and presents statistics about user’s home consumption and also suggestions where improvement can be done. This is made with portion of personalization, according to different user nature and habits. 
If a user allows it, anonymized data from his household are shared with others and vice versa. This improves analysis abilities home ECMA, since it can follow up current trends and standards. Beside measured data, ECMA keeps information about appliances, and also other characteristics of household. All these are possible interesting set for commercial domain. Appliance producers can access it in exchange of detailed technical information about their products, which will also aid in ECMAs’ analysis. This can potentially lead to better environment-friendly appliance’s design, because our system also discovers “chronic” appliance non-effectiveness.

Aims and innovations


  • detection of unused appliance using
  • detection of inefficient appliances
  • appliance type identification
  • consumption prediction
  • data exchange between household and commercial sphere
  • advices suggestion
  • education of effective appliance using