Description: An air conditioner (AC) consumes a significant proportion of the total household power consumption. Primarily used in developing countries, decentralized 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 – maximize 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, realized through an optimization 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 ve 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.
Technologies Used: Python, AMPL, MATLAB
Teammates: Dr. Amarjeet Singh, Dr. Vikas Chandan
Publications:
- Milan Jain, Amarjeet Singh, Vikas Chandan; “Portable+: A Ubiquitous and Smart Way Towards Comfortable Energy Savings”, Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (2017), Vol. 1, No. 2, Article 14. We presented the paper in the Proceedings of the 2017 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp 2017) held in Maui, Hawaii, USA. [ACM][Preprint][Slides]
Milan Jain 