Can You ‘Foresee’ a Smart-Home Future? NREL Researchers Do
August 13, 2018 -- Take a minute to program your smart thermostat. Simple enough, right? Now, set up multiple connected appliances so they all coordinate to reach a common goal. Not so easy, is it? In fact, at the moment it's nearly impossible.
'Right now, if you had a smart dishwasher, a smart washer/dryer, and a smart water heater, you'd have to set up the schedule for everything yourself,' said Bethany Sparn, a mechanical engineer and researcher at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). 'You'd have to think about how the appliances interact with each other, the occupants, the building, and the power grid. Deciding when you should turn on your lights seems reasonably intuitive, but how should you control your water heater to reduce your utility bill and use solar energy from your solar panels, without risking your hot shower?'
The solution could rest with NREL-developed software called 'foresee,' an energy management system that relies on user preferences to control and coordinate a home's connected appliances and electronics. The software first asks users to rank what's most important to them about living in their home. Then it takes those preferences into account and automatically adjusts the devices accordingly.
'Having automation that's built in, that has an understanding of what's required to keep people happy, is definitely not something that's on the market now,' Sparn said.
Dane Christensen, leader of NREL's Residential Systems Performance team and principal investigator on the foresee project, said people typically identify four goals for their house: comfortable air temperature and hot water, convenience, reduced costs, and a low environmental impact. But the order and importance of these goals are different for every household.
'These four categories are hard to trade off against each other,' Christensen said. 'At foresee's core is a goal of running the home in a balanced way that best serves that family's unique values and schedule. Your goals are going to be different from my family's, just like a retiree on a fixed income is likely to have different goals than a millennial who just got her first job and is living large.'
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