Enhancing User Comfort in Demand Response Solutions for Water Heaters: User-Centric Hot Water Management

Demand Response (DR) solutions for tank electric water heaters (WHs) let residential consumers benefit financially, however, a negative impact of DR on personal comfort may force users to reject them. To facilitate DR implementation in practice, there is a need to consider the end-user’s comfort. Typically, DR for WHs concerns only the user satisfaction with a variable water temperature. This paper extends the conventional control by considering the tap water flow as a variable during water activities. The main contributions of this paper are (i) a model to relate user comfort with the tap water flow rate, (ii) the control mechanism consisting of the pre-heating control and the flow control to maintain the user comfort. Simulations demonstrate that the proposed control coupled with the suggested user interface can inform about available trade-offs between energy consumption and comfort, and thus can help the user to rationally save energy for water heating.

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