Smart Homes or Real Homes: Building a Smarter Grid With “Dumb” Houses

Smart homes present numerous potential advantages for home occupants and utilities, including benefits such as energy savings, user convenience, and detailed data collection. Realizing any of these benefits requires a level of home instrumentation, such as the deployment of sensors or upgraded devices within the home. However, due to the expense and overhead of installing such equipment, instrumentation happens slowly and gradually, leading to many homes that are not particularly “smart,” yet should still function as part of the emerging smart grid. As a result, real-world smart home applications, particularly those that operate across many homes, will need to be realized in homes with modest and nonstandardized smart home capabilities. As a case study, we consider the problem of monitoring the energy use of specific devices across many homes without smart home capabilities and describe a prototype system to tackle this problem. Considering such systems may broaden our notions of what constitutes a “smart home” at all.