Do you shut your heat or air conditioning off before leaving the house for work? What about at night, do you power everything down? These different patterns compose something known as your “energy personality,” which some companies are tracking in the hopes of reducing energy consumption.
Using this data, Opower’s Nancy Hersh, the company’s vice president of analytics, recently plotted the energy use of more than 800,000 homes over a 24-hour period. The resulting figure (not shown), in Hersh’s words, resembled a “hairball.” It was a blur of tangled lines, running horizontally, zigzagging from midnight to midnight.
But after Hersh and her team applied some “exploratory techniques” to the data, they saw that there were actually five separate clusters within the seemingly chaotic mess — representing five separate lifestyles that people tend to pursue. “The hairball can actually be untangled into these five separate ways that customers are living,” Hersh says.
With more energy utilities utilizing smart meters, tracking energy data is easier than ever before. Head on over to the Washington Post to see the full report and discover which of the five energy consumers you are!
