On the energy demands of small appliances in homes

Understanding the use of electrical appliances in households is crucial for improving the accuracy of electricity and energy loads forecasts. In particular, bottom-up techniques provide a powerful tool, not only for predicting demands considering sociodemographic characteristics of the occupants, but also to better resolve and implement demand side management strategies in homes. With this purpose, a study of the temporal energy use of low-load appliances (meaning those whose annual energy share is individually negligible but relevant when considered as a group) has been carried out, with the longer term objective of finding a parsimonious approach to modelling them, and which considers an appropriate aggregation of appliances. In this work, a discretetime stochastic process has been implemented for a specific classification of low-load appliances. More precisely, a timeinhomogeneous Markov chain has been used to model energy variations over time for four different categories of appliances and its prediction capabilities have been tested and compared. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.