Keeping score of the Joneses

IT IS possible to reduce your household bills by publicly exposing your use of electricity on a day-to-day basis, according to new research.

A research project by Design Lab staff at the University of Sydney’s faculty of architecture, design and planning studied the energy consumption of 11 households in the Sydney suburb of Darlington in November last year.

The results of the applied design research project, which was called Comparative Feedback in the Street: Exposing Residential Energy Consumption on House Facades, were presented at an international conference in Portugal recently.

The project found public exposure of daily energy usage was effective in changing the behaviour of residents to decrease electricity consumption within their homes.

Group A consisted of five households – each of which was fitted with a large blackboard outside the home that publicly displayed the residents’ daily electricity consumption. The blackboards acted as a scoreboard of the occupants’ daily energy usage. Each house also received a small blackboard and a small digital display monitor inside the house that presented the household’s daily kilowatt usage. The residents were required to use the monitor to keep tabs on their daily usage while the blackboard was used to post the results so they could write notes to themselves about their usage.

Three other homes, or control group B, received the same type of digital display monitor and small blackboard inside their home, while the remaining houses, or control group C, had no blackboard or monitor. The energy usage between the three groups was compared after seven weeks of taking part in the project.

Group A, with the blackboard outside their houses, were found to have decreased their energy usage on average by 2.5% a week compared to a decrease of 1% in control group B and a 0.5% decrease in control group C.

Architecture, design and planning faculty member Dr Martin Tomitsch, who co-devised the project, said publicly exposing the information helped generate healthy competition between neighbours. 

“People found the graphs we drew on the blackboards showing their daily energy usage to be helpful because they could see they had patterns,” Tomitsch said.

“They could see how their energy usage skyrocketed with the use of a toaster, for example, or at the time of day when they all take showers.

“Exposing the information publicly outside the home means that healthy forms of comparison and competition can arise between neighbours, with the result being a greater motivation in reducing one’s energy usage”

Tomitsch said having either the public blackboard or the smaller private one was crucial for giving direct feedback on energy usage so people could monitor their behaviour in terms of electricity usage and to help them alter it to reduce consumption.

He said they were planning more research in the area, starting with an on-campus follow-up study.

“Immediately we will do a follow-up study where we are looking at using a similar system in a different environment so we’re still discussing the details of this but this could be in a public context like in a street or a neighbourhood,” he said.

“We are also discussing using this in a different community like the university because obviously you are dealing with different patterns or very different forms of energy consumption.

“At university housing there is different behaviour in terms of people [not paying] for their electricity so the question would be: how can you still get people to save electricity when they don’t pay for it?”

Tomitsch said he would love to run a similar study in the residential market but with a larger number of houses.

“We see the results only as indications. It’s hard to generalise the results due to the qualitative nature of the study with a low number of participants.”

Tomitsch said based on some of the feedback from the study it would be possible to let residents regulate the system themselves.   

“Some things that occurred during the study were people considering the aesthetics of the public blackboard and how this could become a community driven project maybe so people start updating the boards themselves so that we could hand the ownership to the people,” he said.

“However, another effect was the increase of awareness that was achieved through the public display – both within the households and beyond – in conversations with passers-by, neighbours, visiting friends, family.

“We also found that people were using the blackboard inside the house as a communication tool so they were communicating with other people living in the home and educating themselves about the energy consumption of different appliances. 

“The small blackboard that allow[ed] them to not only look at the display but allowed them to reflect on their energy use, which is a really important aspect when it comes to behaviour change.”

Tomitsch’s work focuses on the urban environment as a real-world context to investigate how to design interactive technology to encourage a more sustainable way of living. The project was funded by the sustainability cluster within the faculty of architecture, design and planning at the University of Sydney.

For more information on the project click here.