Integration of Legacy Appliances into Home Energy Management Systems

TL;DR

This paper explores integrating both smart and legacy appliances into home energy management systems, emphasizing load detection and device profiling to improve energy efficiency and interoperability.

Contribution

It proposes a system architecture for integrating legacy devices into HEMS and demonstrates its feasibility through a real-world case study.

Findings

Load detection enables identification of running appliances.

Device profiling facilitates integration into HEMS.

Feasibility confirmed by measurement campaign.

Abstract

The progressive installation of renewable energy sources requires the coordination of energy consuming devices. At consumer level, this coordination can be done by a home energy management system (HEMS). Interoperability issues need to be solved among smart appliances as well as between smart and non-smart, i.e., legacy devices. We expect current standardization efforts to soon provide technologies to design smart appliances in order to cope with the current interoperability issues. Nevertheless, common electrical devices affect energy consumption significantly and therefore deserve consideration within energy management applications. This paper discusses the integration of smart and legacy devices into a generic system architecture and, subsequently, elaborates the requirements and components which are necessary to realize such an architecture including an application of load detection for the identification of running loads and their integration into existing HEM systems. We assess the feasibility of such an approach with a case study based on a measurement campaign on real households. We show how the information of detected appliances can be extracted in order to create device profiles allowing for their integration and management within a HEMS.