Portable+: A Ubiquitous And Smart Way Towards Comfortable Energy Savings

Journal Article · Fri Jun 30 00:00:00 EDT 2017 · Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3090079· OSTI ID:1374642

Jain, Milan ^[1]; Singh, Amarjeet ^[1]; Chandan, Vikas ^[2]

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1. IIIT-Delhi
2. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

An air conditioner (AC) consumes a significant proportion of the total household power consumption. Primarily used in developing countries, decentralised AC has an inbuilt thermostat to cool the room to a temperature, manually set by the users. However, residents are incapable of specifying their goal through these thermostats - maximise their comfort or save AC energy. State-of-the-art portable thermostats emulate AC remotes and assist occupants in remotely changing the thermostat temperature, through their smartphones. We propose extending such thermostats to portable+ by adding a Comfort-Energy Trade-off (CET) knob, realised through an optimisation framework to allow users to balance their comfort and the savings without worrying about the right set temperature. Analysis based on real data, collected from a controlled experiment (across two rooms for two weeks) and an in-situ deployment (across five rooms for three months), indicates that portable+ thermostats can reduce residents’ discomfort by 23% (CET selection for maximal comfort) and save 26% energy when CET is set for maximising savings.

• Research Organization: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), Richland, WA (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE
• DOE Contract Number: AC05-76RL01830
• OSTI ID: 1374642
• Report Number(s): PNNL-SA-125359
• Journal Information: Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies, Vol. 1, Issue 2; ISSN 2474-9567
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English