OVERVIEW
Project abstract: Austin Oehlerking (Mechanical Engineering '08) conducted a study on electricity use in dorm rooms as a project for the course 2.571 Measurement and Instrumentationduring the spring semester of 2008. He measured the electricity consumption of 18 dorm rooms in German House, an MIT living group, over the span of four weeks. Each room was measured for 24 hours. The average demand per student was 65.08 watts. The top three electricity consumers contributed over 50% of the electricity consumption. More results and conclusions can be found in his report abstract (on the web) and full report (pdf).
Contact: Austin Oehlerking (aoehlerk@mit.edu)
Website: http://scripts.mit.edu.ezproxyberklee.flo.org/~aoehlerk/www
Current status: During the fall semester of 2008, Austin is expanding this project into his undergraduate thesis. He is using wireless meters to simultaneously meter 20 rooms, feeding the data back to residents, and measuring the behavior changes.
DETAILS
Funding sources: two Watt's Up Pro meters were funded by the course 2.671 - Measurement and Instrumentation
Data sources:
- Watt's Up Pro meter in dorm rooms
Documentation:
Recommendations for future work:
- Current work focuses on linking the electricity demand information gathered in Spring of 2008 to behavior change through feedback
- Recommendations for future work will become clearer after completion of the undergraduate thesis
IMPACT
Number of students involved:
- Spring 2008: 1 researcher, 18 subjects
- Fall 2008: 3 student researchers, 1 professor, 18 subjects
Campus footprint: N/A
Other impact:
- From Spring 2008, students really looked at the data and charts and wanted to know how they compared to others in German House
LESSONS FOR FUTURE PROJECTS
Organizational lessons:
- The MIT administration is very willing to work with students and help out with projects such as dorm metering, but coordination is often very difficult because students and staff usually follow different schedules and work at different times of day.
- MIT students are very excited to participate in a project that is perceived as interesting and not a waste of their time - i.e. you need to quickly convince them of the value of your project in their lives and also that their time commitment will be minimal. Then, you will receive cooperation as opposed to resistance.
Technical lessons:
- My preliminary study indicated that a minimum of 14% of the energy used in dorm rooms is completely wasted, usually through speakers and computers that are left running while students sleep or are out of their rooms.
- There is a large discrepancy between the high consumers and the low consumers of electric power. Of the individuals in my study, the largest consumer used an order of magnitude more electricity on average than the lowest quartile of students.