Designing a Portable and Low Cost Home Energy Management Toolkit

In this paper we describe the design of a home energy and comfort management system. The system has three components such as a smart plug with a wireless module, a residential gateway and a mobile app. The combined system is called a home energy management and comfort toolkit. The design is inspired with the fact that making energy visible and able to control it will help to conserve energy. One of the key goals is to create a platform which is extendable based on the needs of the end users. Our proposed system is expected to help end users to control and manage residential energy. We also present some lessons learned while implementing and testing the proposed system. © 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of [name organizer]