Consumer's Broadband Connections Internet Appliance Meters Total Electricity Data Collection Server Cooker Monitor Zigbee WLAN Gateway Secure Tunneling Access Point Device Zigbee Radio Gas Meter Temperature/Humidity Sensor OCR Reader Dw D elli ---- welli ellin g1 ng ng -2 n Dw Fig. 1. Components of the energy monitoring infrastructure in the 3e-Houses project Bristol city pilot. smart metering in social housing. This project was designed to facilitate collection of fine-grained data, showing energy use within a consumer's premises. ICT applications could then encourage declines in overall consumption. As a part of this exercise, two trials were conducted in Spain and Germany, followed by two replicator pilot studies in the U.K. and Germany. In the context of the U.K. pilot, close to one hundred dwellings, comprising of apartments and terraced houses, managed by the Bristol City Council, were considered. The aim of this pilot was to collect finegrained data to gather insights into the consumption patterns of consumers and empower them with information. The information gathered would allow consumers to be conscious and aware of their energy usage. It could also potentially trigger a behavior change that would decrease their energy consumption. The monitoring infrastructure is of vital importance to help achieve these objectives. Fig. 1 shows the different elements deployed in a dwelling in the 3e-Houses pilot in Bristol city to accomplish energy monitoring. Each dwelling was instrumented with an identical set of monitoring equipment to collect and report energy consumption measurements to a data collection server located in the Telecommunications Research Laboratory (TRL) premises of Toshiba Research Europe Ltd. A detailed description of the technical design of the IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE | FALL 2014 monitoring solution can be found in [12]. As shown in the figure, the following items were monitored in each dwelling: ■■ ■■ ■■ ■■ Appliance meters: Five smart plugs where a number of appliances in the dwelling were connected in order to monitor appliance specific consumption. Temperature and humidity sensors to report the ambient temperature and humidity in the dwelling. An optical character recognition module to read the Gas meter dial and transfer the digitized reading to a Zigbee radio device for transmission. A cooker monitor to track the energy consumption of the cooker. | 73