Hunting Cyclic Energy Wasters

Smart grid and smart meter initiatives seek to enable energy providers and consumers to intelligently manage their energy needs through real-time monitoring, analysis, and control. An essential element of intelligent management and control is access to information. The nonintrusive load monitor (NILM) identifies the operation of electrical loads from an aggregate service, making installation inexpensive, and speeding data collation and analytics. Smart meters are likely, in the near future, to be tasked with finding energy waste without requiring unreasonable demands for communication bandwidth. This paper presents NilmManager and NilmDB; tools for finding electromechanical energy wasters with a minimum of network bandwidth.