Design and implementation of an intelligent energy saving system based on standby power reduction for a future zero-energy home environment

Energy saving has attracted great attention as a global issue because of recent environmental problems. As a part of energy saving efforts, governments are operating policies that encourage the distribution of energy saving systems. Also, individual households are voluntarily installing energy saving systems to reduce electric power consumption. However, due to fixed system architecture, the existing systems have a disadvantage, lacking in scalability and usability. In addition, the existing systems bring up immense inconvenience as it returns to standby mode after automatic standby power cut-off. Therefore, we propose an intelligent energy saving system to solve these problems. The proposed system controls the power based on the hierarchical relationship among home appliances, along with the relationship between user activity and home appliances for standby power reduction. We designed and implemented the proposed system, deployed it in the test bed, and measured the total power consumption to verify the system performance. The proposed system reduces total power consumption up to 10.5%.