Non-intrusive and intrusive energy monitoring methods overview and their relation with household appliances state sensors devices

Abstract

This work deals with different types of residential energy monitoring methods, comparing their advantages and disadvantages. More specifically, this works focus on the relationship between these methods and the usage of state sensors devices. They are classified as: ILM (Intrusive Load Monitoring), where power information is acquired per household appliance and NILM (Non-intrusive Load Monitoring), where only one meter is used to get the total energy consumption information. Although, the first method is more effective for regular consumers to help saving energy, both of them provide good energy estimation values. We have shown that when comparing both methods, the state sensor devices can assist to reduce computational efforts for NILM disaggregation algorithms and to infer energy estimate with ILM techniques. Comparing with the commercial devices, the last method can be considered an important and low cost solution, with only 10% error rate.