Short paper: Comparing energy feedback techniques for dormitory students in India

Abstract

Recent research work has explored solutions to address the problem of increased energy consumption by providing feedback to individuals about their consumption patterns, thus motivating them for conservative actions. In particular, university dormitory setting provides an excellent venue to explore effectiveness of energy feedback mechanisms. Most of such dormitory studies used a web-based portal for enabling competition among students as motivation for energy saving. Moreover, the majority of them have been conducted in the developed world. In this paper, we report a 6-week study conducted in an Indian university with 432 students (18 groups), comparing five different eco-feedback techniques. The results show that Daily Individual Paper Feedback encourages more conservation, both among males and females, with 19.4% and 7.6% reduction, respectively. We conclude with a discussion on the importance of easy and regular availability of information, effectiveness of paper-based feedback, and role of gender in eco-feedback.