Making home energy usage transparent for households using smart meters

This article describes an approach for a system, which helps to increase energy efficiency in households by providing more transparency of energy consumption on single device level. The main idea is to analyze energy consumption using a smart meter and break it down into its individual characteristic components using an algorithm. Having such data, an online energy efficiency coach can provide households with personalized advice on saving energy on a single-device level with minimal time effort and great social experience. In order to develop such an algorithm, a simulation environment was created, which allows generating a huge number of virtual households based on real measurements of single devices. This article describes the simulation environment, how data is measured and collected and how the platform is set up.