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Learning About the AWARE@Home Project

The United States represents less than 5% of the world’s population and consumes approximately 25% of its energy. The goal of AWARE@home is to reduce energy, gas, and water consumption in the U.S. residential and commercial sectors by creating real-time consumption awareness that will encourage consumers to save money and protect the environment at the same time. While related technologies exist for industrial use, little has been done to bring energy and utility (e.g., electricity, gas, water) management to individual American homes using Wi-Fi technology. Our goal in this project is to develop a system that could help millions of households reduce their expenditures on utility consumption by 10%. While modest and realistic sounding, such an accomplishment would represent a massive reduction in resource utilization and pollution that would begin to put the United States on a more environmentally sustainable path.

AWARE@home is a simple-to-use and inexpensive tool for Americans to monitor their own utility consumption patterns. It empowers consumers to save money, conserve resources, and get more in-touch with their “environmental footprint”. By reducing U.S. household consumption of natural gas, water, electricity, and gasoline, AWARE@home will help to shift the environmental focus and discussion from developing new infrastructure (putting solutions well off into the future) to much more inexpensively improving the existing infrastructure and consumption patterns today. It will also serve to relieve some of the pressure being placed on water scarce regions, as well as help to reduce dependence on foreign oil.

	Our Idea in the Making The AWARE@home system, developed with EPA P3 funding, provides consumers the ability to view their own utility usage (natural gas, electricity, and oil) and expenditures over an at-home wireless network. Since we believe that consumers are generally too busy to actively keep track of usage, we have created a simple interface that only asks the user to input the rates he or she pays for utilities and how much he or she is willing to spend on utilities each month. When this amount is likely to be exceeded in a given month (say, two weeks into the billing cycle) the system either sends an email or triggers a pop-up window. Thus, consumers can take action to save money and reduce environmental impact before the bill arrives in the mail.

Our Project The Aware at Home project has developed into a significant resource in determining your electricity, gas, and water consumption as well as an avenue of providing a jump in wireless data monitoring for electrical companies. To see more on the details of our project click here.	See Our Resources To learn more about the resources and products we have used to develop our prototype click here. The products as well as corporate web sites and pertinent data sheets and product specifications have been listed.

EPA Sustainable Design Award Winner 2005! (more)

Learning About the AWARE@Home Project