Analysis of fingerprints of electric appliances as starting point for an appliance characteristics catalog

Our goal is to successively build and publish a catalog of appliance characteristics. This is a fundamental basis for Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) because it helps to structure the multitude of different appliances by grouping them in classes. In this paper we investigate time series signatures of electric household appliances, so called "fingerprints". We describe a methodology to find similarities in the loads\´ signatures that currently relies on visual inspection. First results are discussed on the basis of three types of equipment.