McGill Students Fiona Yuan and Christopher Tegho win at 2014 Scotiabank EcoLiving Student Leadership Award

Yuan and Tegho are in their last year of electrical engineering at McGill University and are keen about sustainability and energy conservation. Together they designed an “energy management and power disaggregation” system that helps homeowners and businesses better monitor, control and manage the energy use of individual appliances.

Their system records and monitors energy consumption of appliances using a power meter that is installed at the source of distribution. Advanced processing software then takes that information and breaks it down into how the energy is being consumed. It then feeds that information to a mobile app, giving businesses and homeowners better control over energy consumption.

“Trying to monitor power consumption at the appliance level isn’t new,” said Whittingham. “But coming up with an almost purely software-based solution makes this system exceedingly cheap and adaptable.”

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