Demystifying the Relationship Between Use-Phase Attributes and Energy Consumption: A Case Study of Personal Computers Available to Purchase

Understanding the use-phase energy consumption of consumer electronics is of great importance, as it has significant effects on both policy and product designs. Inaccurate estimations of the use phase energy consumption can offset the results of the life cycle assessment and impeach the effectiveness of the energy intervention policies. The use phase energy consumption is governed by the consumers’ usage behavior. However, the relationship between consumers’ attributes and their usage behavior, and energy consumption is not clear. This paper analyzes two data sets, a data set of hard drives’ Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology (S.M.A.R.T) and the Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS) to shed light on the relationship between usage behavior and energy consumption. Several supervised and unsupervised machine-learning methods have been used to reveal possible trends in the consumers’ use-phase attributes. The results of the study suggest that various demographic properties and behavioral variables related to computer usage affect the energy consumption profile of households.