Circuit-Level Load Monitoring for Household Energy Management

Circuit-level nonintrusive load monitoring can overcome some of the basic problems relative to whole-house NILM, enabling sophisticated energy-monitoring applications. The two proposed approaches demonstrate the effectiveness of this technique. Here, we describe two approaches for circuit-level NILM that enable detailed, practical household energy monitoring: a heuristic-based approach and a Bayesian approach. Both address the limitations of previous NILM algorithms by considering steady-state power use in addition to step changes in steady-state power use and by using circuit-level energy measurements. Using the historical steady-state energy use pattern for each device lets us more precisely classify each edge and eliminate some cases of indistinguishable step changes. By measuring energy use at the circuit level, we can overcome the inability of whole-house NILM to monitor small or variable-power devices. This is because there are fewer devices on each circuit and high-powered devices (such as a stove, hot-water heater, air conditioner, and clothes dryer) each receive dedicated circuits and won´t overshadow lower-powered devices (such as LVs, radios, and cell phone chargers).