CASPRE: A context-aware standby power reduction scheme for household appliances

Abstract

Many household appliances draw standby power, which can be reduced to save total energy consumption of a household. Smart plugs are proposed for effectively reducing standby power of an appliance by monitoring and cutting power when the appliance is no longer in use. However, the level of intelligence it leverages is minimal such that it still requires a direct manipulation by the user and does not make a use out of any other contexts. In this paper, we propose a context-aware standby power reduction scheme, CASPRE that reduces the total standby power of household appliances by controlling smart plugs through context reasoning. The proposed scheme leverages the notion of correlations that exist among appliances when conducting a specific task at home. An ongoing task can be inferred from contexts of multiple appliances and those that do not belong to the current task can be turned off. Experiments on real world power datasets show that the proposed scheme more effectively reduces total standby power than existing ones.