Electricity Saving with IoT

As more than 50% of office workers continue to work from home, and with news that electricity tariff will increase by another 9.3% in quarter 4, there is opportunity to relook at our household electricity consumption – the majority of which are heating home appliances.

One of my heating appliance activate its heating function at regular intervals. Electricity is consumed as it reheat itself. A question came to my mind, how much impact does environmental factors (external cooling, weather, etc) affect its frequency of heating.

We can structure it according to process formula:
y = f(x)
– y is the electricity consumption which is directly dependent on the frequency of reheating
– x are multiple factors such as external cooling, weather, time, etc

A month ago, I deployed a IoT device and connect it to my analytics platform. The IoT is easily configured in less than 10mins. The analytics platform is free to use with frequency at every 15 seconds. Paid version allow frequency of monitoring every second. Below is an image of the IoT configuration.

The device is left there for over 2 days. A 10,000 mAh battery pack is used and no additional charge is required throughout these two days.

The graph below are the observation – the external cooling has greater impact on the frequency of reheating – 7 times in 3 hours (Monday) compared to 7 times in 4 hours (Tuesday).

The collected data validate the impact of external factors. A few adjustments were immediately made – shifting the orientation of external cooling and stopping the reheat when not in use. At the latest utility bill, a 10% reduction in usage is seen.

Insights into the real world should be easier with easy-to-deploy and code-free IoT devices.

If you would like to learn how to use the IoT kit, and take home the kit after learning, sign up for the course here. It is being delivered quarterly below:
https://www.rp.edu.sg/ace/short-course/Detail/adopting-digital-technologies-into-operations