An improved comfort biased smart home load manager for grid connected homes under direct load control

Abstract

This paper presents an improved comfort biased smart home load manager (iCBSHLM) for grid connected residential houses. The proposed algorithm discriminates household loads into class 1 (air-conditioner, heating) and class 2 loads (dishwasher, cloth washer and cloth dryer) and achieves electricity consumption reduction and electricity cost reduction of up to 2.9% and 7.5% respectively using dynamic pricing (Price1) over time of use pricing (Price0), while ensuring that indoor temperature is kept within the user prescribed range and without any violation. iCBSHLM advances existing home energy management systems (HEMs) by ensuring that vulnerable household residents (especially the elderly) can still benefit from smart grid initiatives like HEMs without any discomfort. Furthermore, this research presents a simplistic model for heating, ventilation and cooling (HVAC) loads using capacitor charging/discharging behaviour.