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ThermoCoach: Reducing Home Energy Consumption with Personalized Thermostat Recommendations

Published: 04 November 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Thermostats have the potential for tremendous impact on global energy consumption, but unfortunately they are often not used effectively. In this paper, we present a new system called ThermoCoach that improves thermostat usability by giving personalized and actionable recommendations for thermostat use. The system senses human occupancy patterns in a home and emails the household suggested setpoint schedules that can be modified or activated with the click of a button. We performed a randomized controlled trial by deploying over 600 devices in 40 homes from 12 weeks to compare ThermoCoach with a manually programmable thermostat and the Nest learning thermostat. Results indicate that ThermoCoach saves 4.7% more energy than a manually programmable thermostat and 12.4% more energy than the Nest learning thermostat while significantly improving comfort over both approaches.

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Cited By

View all
  • (2023)Developing occupant-centric smart home thermostats with energy-saving and comfort-improving goalsEnergy and Buildings10.1016/j.enbuild.2023.113579299(113579)Online publication date: Nov-2023
  • (2022)A scalable and practical method for disaggregating heating and cooling electrical usage using smart thermostat and smart metre dataJournal of Building Performance Simulation10.1080/19401493.2022.203235215:2(251-267)Online publication date: 7-Feb-2022
  • (2021)Real-time model for unit-level heating and cooling energy prediction in multi-family residential housingJournal of Building Performance Simulation10.1080/19401493.2021.196849514:4(420-445)Online publication date: 25-Aug-2021
  • Show More Cited By

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
BuildSys '15: Proceedings of the 2nd ACM International Conference on Embedded Systems for Energy-Efficient Built Environments
November 2015
264 pages
ISBN:9781450339810
DOI:10.1145/2821650
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 04 November 2015

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Author Tags

  1. hardware
  2. infrastructure
  3. software

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  • Research-article

Funding Sources

  • National Science Foundation

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Acceptance Rates

BuildSys '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 20 of 66 submissions, 30%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 148 of 500 submissions, 30%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2023)Developing occupant-centric smart home thermostats with energy-saving and comfort-improving goalsEnergy and Buildings10.1016/j.enbuild.2023.113579299(113579)Online publication date: Nov-2023
  • (2022)A scalable and practical method for disaggregating heating and cooling electrical usage using smart thermostat and smart metre dataJournal of Building Performance Simulation10.1080/19401493.2022.203235215:2(251-267)Online publication date: 7-Feb-2022
  • (2021)Real-time model for unit-level heating and cooling energy prediction in multi-family residential housingJournal of Building Performance Simulation10.1080/19401493.2021.196849514:4(420-445)Online publication date: 25-Aug-2021
  • (2021)A data-driven model for building energy normalization to enable eco-feedback in multi-family residential buildings with smart and connected technologyJournal of Building Performance Simulation10.1080/19401493.2021.192875514:4(343-365)Online publication date: 29-May-2021
  • (2021)Phone-based ambient temperature sensing using opportunistic crowdsensing and machine learningSustainable Computing: Informatics and Systems10.1016/j.suscom.2020.10047929(100479)Online publication date: Mar-2021
  • (2019)Hot or NotProceedings of the 6th ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Buildings, Cities, and Transportation10.1145/3360322.3360856(41-50)Online publication date: 13-Nov-2019
  • (2019)BuildSenseACM Transactions on Sensor Networks10.1145/334117115:3(1-23)Online publication date: 9-Aug-2019
  • (2018)Co-performanceProceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3173574.3173699(1-13)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2018
  • (2018)Differentiating ‘the user’ in DSR: Developing demand side response in advanced economiesEnergy Policy10.1016/j.enpol.2018.07.013122(176-185)Online publication date: Nov-2018
  • (2018)Understanding Home Energy Saving RecommendationsPersuasive Technology10.1007/978-3-319-78978-1_25(297-309)Online publication date: 3-Apr-2018
  • Show More Cited By

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