Abstract-Energy and environmental sustainability can benefit a lot from advances in data mining and machine learning techniques. However, those advances rely on the availability of relevant datasets required to develop, improve and validate new techniques. Only recently the first datasets were made publicly available for the energy and sustainability research community. In this paper we present a freely available dataset containing power usage and related information from 50 homes. Here we describe our dataset, the hardware and software setups used when collecting the data and how others can access it. We then discuss potential uses of this data in the future of energy ecofeedback and demand side management research.

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For the last couple of decades the world has been witnessing a change in habits of energy consumption in domestic environments, with electricity emerging as the main source of energy consumed. The effects of these changes in our eco-system are hard to assess, therefore encouraging researchers from different fields to conduct studies with the goal of understanding and improving perceptions and behaviors regarding household energy consumption. While several of these studies report success in increasing awareness, most of them are limited to short periods of time, thus resulting in a reduced knowledge of how householders will behave in the long-term. In this paper we attempt to reduce this gap presenting a long-term study on household electricity consumption. We deployed a real-time non-intrusive energy monitoring and ecofeedback system in 12 families during 52 weeks. Results show an increased awareness regarding electricity consumption despite a significant decrease in interactions with the eco-feedback system over time. We conclude that after one year of deployment of eco-feedback it was not possible to see any significant increase or decrease in the household consumption. Our results also confirm that consumption is tightly coupled with independent variables like the household size and the income-level of the families.

Abstract. This paper reports a 15 weeks study of artistic eco-feedback deployed in six houses with an innovative sensing infrastructure and visualization strategy. The paper builds on previous work that showed a significant decrease in user awareness after a short period with a relapse in consumption. In this study we aimed to investigate if new forms of feedback could overcome this issue, maintaining the users awareness for longer periods of time. The study presented here aims at understanding if people are more aware of their energy consumption after the installation of a new, art inspired eco-feedback. The research question was then: does artistic eco-feedback provide an increased awareness over normal informative feedback? And does that awareness last longer? To answer this questions participants were interviewed and their consumption patterns analyzed. The main contribution of the paper is to advance our knowledge about the effectiveness of eco-feedback and provide guidelines for implementation of novel eco-feedback visualizations that overcome the relapse behavior pattern.