Leveraging smart meter data to recognize home appliances

The worldwide adoption of smart meters that measure and communicate residential electricity consumption gives rise to the development of new energy efficiency services. Several particularly promising applications involve the disaggregation of individual appliances within a particular household in terms of their energy demand. In this paper we present an infrastructure and a set of algorithms that make use of smart meters together with smartphones to realize new energy efficiency services (such as itemized electricity bills or targeted energy saving advice). The smartphones, together with a novel filtering approach, much simplify the training process for appliances signature recognition. We also report on the performance of our system that was tested with 8 simultaneous devices, achieving recognition rates of 87%.