Non-Intrusive Energy Use Monitoring for a Group of Electrical Appliances

Energy use monitoring techniques are useful to home and facility owners, enabling them to save energy and reduce costs. The monitoring methods published so far are focused on detecting individual appliances and determining their respective energy consumption. This paper proposes a method for estimating the energy use of a group of appliances with similar electrical characteristics and operation patterns. The proposed method consists of two steps. The first step is to determine the probability that a given electrical event is caused by a member of the appliance group of interest. The second step analytically estimates the mean value and standard deviation of the total energy use of the appliance group based on the combination of Bernoulli distributions. Case studies using both simulations and field measurements have shown that the proposed method is able to accurately detect power and energy for a given group of appliances. It fills an important gap in non-intrusive energy use monitoring research for homes and facilities.