Increasing energy awareness through web-enabled power outlets

Rising global energy demand, increasing electricity prices, and the limitation of natural resources has led to increased thoughts on residential energy consumption. A necessary step towards energy conservation is to provide timely and fine-grained consumption information. This allows for users to identify energy saving opportunities and possibly adjust their behavior to conserve energy. In this paper, we present a device-level energy monitoring system that is based on off-the-shelf components and enables users to monitor, control, and compare the electricity consumption of their appliances. By providing a RESTful API, we seamlessly integrate the smart power outlets into the web and facilitate the development of extensions and novel features. We demonstrate this through the implementation of a web user interface and a mobile phone interface. We further confirm the suitability of our approach with the help of a 12 months pilot deployment. The results of a questionnaire provide insights into additional user features and the interviews conducted with developers who used our open sourced system illustrate the usefulness of the RESTful approach for the smart energy domain.