Sensing from the basement: a feasibility study of unobtrusive and low-cost home activity recognition
UIST '06 Proceedings of the 19th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology
NAWMS: nonintrusive autonomous water monitoring system
Proceedings of the 6th ACM conference on Embedded network sensor systems
HydroSense: infrastructure-mediated single-point sensing of whole-home water activity
Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Ubiquitous computing
The self-programming thermostat: optimizing setback schedules based on home occupancy patterns
Proceedings of the First ACM Workshop on Embedded Sensing Systems for Energy-Efficiency in Buildings
Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems
Contactless sensing of appliance state transitions through variations in electromagnetic fields
Proceedings of the 2nd ACM Workshop on Embedded Sensing Systems for Energy-Efficiency in Building
Learning time-based presence probabilities
Pervasive'11 Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Pervasive computing
Hot water DJ: saving energy by pre-mixing hot water
BuildSys '12 Proceedings of the Fourth ACM Workshop on Embedded Sensing Systems for Energy-Efficiency in Buildings
WaterSense: water flow disaggregation using motion sensors
Proceedings of the Third ACM Workshop on Embedded Sensing Systems for Energy-Efficiency in Buildings
FixtureFinder: discovering the existence of electrical and water fixtures
Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Information processing in sensor networks
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The average home in the US flushes 1000's of gallons of water down the drain each year while standing at the fixture and waiting for hot water. Some households use a pump for hot water recirculation (HWR) to ensure that hot water is always immediately available, but these systems can incur more than $1000 per year in energy costs. In this paper, we explore the hypothesis that "just-in-time" HWR can reduce the energy footprint of HWR systems, without increasing hardware or installation costs and without increasing water waste or human annoyance. Our basic approach is to learn patterns of hot water usage in the home and to circulate hot water only when future hot water usage is highly likely. We call this approach Circulo. We evaluate Circulo by analyzing hot water usage patterns from 5 different homes over a period of 7--10 days each. Our results indicate that Circulo can reduce the energy needed for HWR by 30% while still providing households with hot water over 90% of the time.