Ceiling Fan and Ceiling Fan Light Kit use in the U.S. Results of a Survey on Amazon Mechanical Turk

Kantner, C.L.S.; Young, Scott J.; Donovan, Sally M.; Garbesi, Karina

doi:10.2172/1165855

Cited by 3 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…Crowdsourcing platforms tend to under-represent elderly, low-income and low-education people, introducing sampling bias [33,61]. Other studies showed that cell weighting can be used to calibrate and adjust the results [39], but some segments of the population will most likely never be adequately captured through crowdsourcing. In our survey we did not collect the demographics of the sample, but our results match reasonably well data collected in other studies even without weighting.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Energy efficiency and the misuse of programmable thermostats: The effectiveness of crowdsourcing for understanding household behavior

Pritoni

Meier

Aragón

et al. 2015

Energy Research & Social Science

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Programmable thermostats are generally sold as energy-saving devices controlling heating and cooling systems, but can lead to energy waste when not operated as designed by the manufacturers. We utilized Amazon Mechanical Turk, an online crowdsourcing service, to investigate thermostat settings and behavior in households. We posted a survey and paid respondents to upload pictures of their thermostats to verify self-reported data. About 40% of programmable thermostat owners did not use programming features and 33% had programming features overridden. Respondents demonstrated numerous misconceptions about how thermostats control home energy use. Moreover, we found that 57% of households were occupied nearly all the time, limiting the potential energy savings. The study revealed flaws in self-reported data, when collected solely from traditional surveys, which raises concerns about the validity of current thermostat-related research using such data. "Ground truth" temperature data could now be available in homes with Internet-connected thermostats. Online crowdsourcing platforms emerge as valuable tools for collecting information that would be difficult or expensive to obtain through other means. Advantages over traditional surveys include low-cost, rapid design-implementation-result cycle, access to diverse population, use of multimedia. Crowdsourcing is more effective than alternative online tools due to easier recruitment process and respondents' reputation system. HIGHLIGHTS  Crowdsourcing services was used to study how people use thermostats  Crowdsourced data was verified by comparing self-reported data with uploaded photos  This procedure revealed inconsistencies and misconceptions in thermostat usage  One third of programmable thermostat owners had programming features disabled  Online crowdsourcing is a valuable tool for collecting energy usage data in homes

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…[36]. The Mechanical Turk has also been used in the US to survey saturation of miscellaneous appliances [37,38] and characteristics and usage patterns of ceiling fans [39].…”

Section: Interface-related Behaviormentioning

confidence: 99%

Energy efficiency and the misuse of programmable thermostats: The effectiveness of crowdsourcing for understanding household behavior

Pritoni

Meier

Aragón

et al. 2015

Energy Research & Social Science

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Several articles have reviewed the positives and negatives of using AMT for surveys and research (Paolacci et al 2010;Buhrmester et al 2011;Goodman et al 2013). For the current study, we used data on refrigerators and freezers 10 from a survey of refrigeration products (Greenblatt et al 2013b); we used data on televisions from a survey of televisions and set-top boxes 11 ; and we used data on ceiling fans from a survey on ceiling fans (Kantner et al 2013). Each of the surveys was performed for a separate project, and they focused 6 on information not available from other sources.…”

Section: Data Sourcesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…By showing that online surveys of appliance usage can accurately estimate appliance ownership, the present study suggests that online surveys can be used to estimate a host of important aspects about appliance usage that would otherwise be unknown when doing energy efficiency research. For example, consider a recent study on ceiling fans (Kantner et al 2013). Ceiling fans are a common appliance in households, but there has been little study of their energy use.…”

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confidence: 99%

Assessment of household appliance surveys collected with Amazon Mechanical Turk

Yang

Donovan²,

Young

et al. 2015

Energy Efficiency

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Energy researchers need data on residential appliances to make effective recommendations for reducing energy consumption. For some products, however, traditional data sources do not have sufficient detail. Online surveys can provide a less expensive alternative for data collection, but the accuracy of these surveys is still unclear. Here, we compare the results of Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) online surveys of refrigerators, freezers, televisions, and ceiling fans to the nationwide Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS) deployed by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). To account for differences in demographic distributions between the online survey results and the general population, we weighted the results using standard cell weighting and raking techniques, as well as a combination of these, termed "hybrid." The weighted results gave a distribution of product ownership that was reasonably close to RECS, albeit with small, statistically significant differences in some cases. The cell weighting method provided a slightly better agreement with RECS than the other two approaches. We recommend AMT online surveys as an efficient and cost-effective way of gathering in-home use data on appliances that are not adequately covered by existing data sources.2

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Cooling energy savings and occupant feedback in a two year retrofit evaluation of 99 automated ceiling fans staged with air conditioning

Miller

Raftery

Nakajima

et al. 2021

Energy and Buildings

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Ceiling Fan and Ceiling Fan Light Kit use in the U.S. Results of a Survey on Amazon Mechanical Turk

Cited by 3 publications

References 7 publications

Energy efficiency and the misuse of programmable thermostats: The effectiveness of crowdsourcing for understanding household behavior

Energy efficiency and the misuse of programmable thermostats: The effectiveness of crowdsourcing for understanding household behavior

Assessment of household appliance surveys collected with Amazon Mechanical Turk

Cooling energy savings and occupant feedback in a two year retrofit evaluation of 99 automated ceiling fans staged with air conditioning

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