Output details

UTILITY METERING

This patent outlines the key novel methods needed to determine the signature of electrical appliances. These techniques enable a smart meter to determine how much energy is consumed in individual appliances, thus providing a consumer with a richer understanding of their energy use. This is one of the key patents that formed the basis of the spin-out company Intelligent Sustainable Energy, which has now merged with Navetas Energy Systems.

The key research question was 'What is the best method to detect the energy signature from an appliance when measured at the point of common connection - i.e. at the meter. This information can then be used to give a user much richer information about where their energy is used.' The focus of this work is the separation of the signals from different appliances, using a combination of a sophisticated transient detector followed by a classifier (which appliance just changed state) and categorisor (what appliance is it). The new insight of this work was that transients of different appliances are varied, therefore a generic transient detector needs to be robust. Subsequent patents on categorisation of motors followed on from this work (see Patent GB2472251 A).