Smart * : An Open Data Set and Tools for Enabling Research in Sustainable Homes

The goal of the Smart* project is to optimize home energy consumption. As part of the project, we have designed and deployed a “live” system that continuously gathers a wide variety of environmental and operational data in three real homes. In contrast to prior work, our focus has been on sensing depth, i.e., collecting as much data as possible from each home, rather than breadth, i.e., collecting data from as many homes as possible. Our data captures many important aspects of the home environment, including average household electricity usage every second, as well as usage at every circuit and nearly every plug load, electricity generation data from on-site solar panels and wind turbines, outdoor weather data, temperature and humidity data in indoor rooms, and, finally, data for a range of important binary events, e.g., at wall switches, the HVAC system, doors, and from motion sensors. We also have electricity usage data every minute from 400 anonymous homes. This data corpus has served as the foundation for much of our recent research. In this paper, we describe our data sets as well as basic software tools we have developed to facilitate their collection. We are releasing both the data and tools publicly to the research community to foster future research on designing sustainable homes.