Microsoft Hohm

I've just come across Microsoft's Hohm, an energy visualisation web app similar to Google's powermeter. It's only open to US buildings at the moment, but looks pretty sharp and seems to pull data from a variety of sources. Here's a screen shot of the main dashboard:


This shows the building's overall Hohm score, a measure of its efficiency from 0 to 100, 100 being the best. It also compares the annual cost of energy use of the building compared to the local area's average.

From the dashboard you can select an option to breakdown this annual consumption by appliance type, giving the screen show below:

Now the information shown here is very interesting. Without uploading any data collected from meters at the building, Hohm has estimated the breakdown of energy use. Not only is the overall consumption broken down by appliance type, but selecting an appliance type breaks it down further by individual appliances.

The estimates shown are based on data from a range of sources:

• Building properties (size, age etc.)
• Appliance properties (chosen boiler type etc.)
• Weather data

I'd be really interested in how these estimated breakdowns change when the household aggregate energy data is uploaded. In addition, I'd like to see how these estimations differ from those produced by NIALMs.