Routines and energy intensity of activities in the smart home

The instrumental view of smart homes and their users is premised on active management of energy demand contributing to energy system objectives. In this chapter we explore a novel way of using data from smart home technologies (SHTs) to link energy consumption in homes to daily activities. We use activities as a descriptive term for the common ways households spend their time at home. These activities, such as cooking or laundering, are meaningful to households’ own lived experience. We set out a novel method for disaggregating a household’s electricity consumption down to the appliance level allowing us to make inferences about the activities occurring in the home in any given time period. We apply this method to analyse the pattern of activities over the course of one month in 10 of the homes participating in the SHT field trial described in Chap. 1. We show how both the energy intensity and temporal routines of different activities vary both within and between households. Our method also clearly reveals the complexities of everyday life at home which shapes the domestication of SHTs.