Temporal Visualization of Energy Consumption Loads Using Time-Tone

Feedback plays an important role in assisting users to better understand their energy consumption behaviour. This is particularly true when users want to change their behaviour in order to reduce their energy consumption, and to manage their usage more effectively so as to avoid putting unnecessary load on energy providers. This paper presents the time-tone visualization, which aims to assist users by displaying variations in energy consumption by different categories of household devices over time, and their respective contributions to the total energy usage load. A user study conducted to compare time-tone against area-charts shows that although the two visualizations are comparable, time-tone is more effective for cases where there are large variations in energy usage loads.