Abstract
For the last couple of decades the world has been witnessing a change in habits of energy consumption in domestic environments, with electricity emerging as the main source of energy consumed. The effects of these changes in our eco-system are hard to assess, therefore encouraging researchers from different fields to conduct studies with the goal of understanding and improving perceptions and behaviors regarding household energy consumption. While several of these studies report success in increasing awareness, most of them are limited to short periods of time, thus resulting in a reduced knowledge of how householders will behave in the long-term. In this paper we attempt to reduce this gap presenting a long-term study on household electricity consumption. We deployed a real-time non-intrusive energy monitoring and eco-feedback system in 12 families during 52 weeks. Results show an increased awareness regarding electricity consumption despite a significant decrease in interactions with the eco-feedback system over time. We conclude that after one year of deployment of eco-feedback it was not possible to see any significant increase or decrease in the household consumption. Our results also confirm that consumption is tightly coupled with independent variables like the household size and the income-level of the families.
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Pereira, L., Quintal, F., Barreto, M., Nunes, N.J. (2013). Understanding the Limitations of Eco-feedback: A One-Year Long-Term Study. In: Holzinger, A., Pasi, G. (eds) Human-Computer Interaction and Knowledge Discovery in Complex, Unstructured, Big Data. HCI-KDD 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7947. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39146-0_21
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39146-0_21
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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