Fighting against Vampire Appliances through Eco-aware Things
Juan López-de-Armentia∗ , Diego Casado-Mansilla∗ and Diego López-de-Ipiña∗
∗ Deusto Institute of Technology - DeustoTech, University of Deusto, MORElab Envisioning Future Internet
Avda. Universidades 24, 48007 - Bilbao, Spain
{juan.lopezdearmentia, dcasado, dipina}@deusto.es
Abstract—This paper provides an overview of how Internet-
connected objects can lead to a social change towards energy-
efficiency in areas where people inhabit (cities, buildings or
homes). For this aim it is proposed the use of social networks,
like Twitter, as an interaction and communication channel
between smart objects and human beings. The presented work
demonstrates, by means of an experiment, how an augmented
everyday object, i.e. a capsule-based coffee machine, may
help to reduce the unnecessary consumed energy in electric
appliances. The paper opens the discussion of the promising
potential of combining people and future smart everyday
objects teaming up to promote a more sustainable behaviour
on the planet’s behalf.
Keywords-Smart Everyday Objects; Social Devices; Persua-
sive Technology; Eco-Awareness; Energy-efficiency;
I. I NTRODUCTION
In the past decades every communication course (e.g.
held at the university or school) was intended to teach
people, i.e. human beings, to express in public their feelings
or knowledge to the attendees in a clear and understandable
manner. Now with the advent of the “everything-connected”
era, new computational actors come to express their feelings
and should be also prepared to spread such information
in a comprehensible way for humans and other machines.
This is possible today due to the emergence of appropriate
semantic models and more natural, intuitive, and even
affective interaction channels.
Consequently we are now ready to make everyday things
smart enough to be able to sense surrounding information,
and to express their acquired knowledge in an interactive,
multimodal and comprehensible way. This idea is not naive
at all, since we can not perceive all the information and
data around us, either because we are not physiologically
able to ”sense” such information, for instance CO2 particles
or the energy consumption of home appliances, or either
because we are not physically in the appropriate place to be
aware of such information (imagine somebody who has left
the water tap open in the bath and forgets to close it when
moving to another room). This ongoing research work is
motivated by these conceptions and targets in the field of
energy-awareness.
The presented paper is specifically focused on the energy
leakage of everyday appliances when they operate in the
standby mode, the vampire mode. The authors argue that
Internet-connected objects may substantially contribute to
the mitigation of such a waste by informing in a persuasive
manner to concerned users about the misuse of electronic
appliances. This paper addresses the challenges of eco-
awareness and the energy-efficiency by making both ap-
proaches more tangible and more ’Do-it-Yourself’ (DiY)
allowing people to create their own eco-smart object1 . The
authors state that the union of people and technology forms
the best team to promote a more sustainable behaviour
change on our planet’s behalf.
Obviously new communication channels to interact with
smart everyday objects are needed if we want to get the
best of their collected knowledge. The authors borrow on
the ideas issued by Tom Igoe’s book ’Making things talk’
when he speaks about the fact that things should start to
feel and to gossip in our physical world [1].
The first ideas that arose about what channels would
appropriately make objects communicate, were those that
most people could perceive and be aware of. In the case
of the @Social cof f ee (the alter ego of the mock-up that
has been implemented to perform the experiment), it was
decided to cover such communication need with Twitter2
social networking service. By using this platform, smart
everyday objects and human beings will be placed at the
same communication layer, and can mutually learn and
cooperate with each other.
To summarise, the presented paper contributes with the
design of a new physical interaction model to express the
@Social cof f ee feelings, using ambient light colours, and
a digital and social medium to interact with the crowd
and not only individuals near to the coffee-maker, through
Twitter. So, it aims to change the human mindsets towards a
more sustainable behaviour. Moreover the @Social cof f ee
is fully-aligned with the ICT for Green ideas [2] and it
is designed and implemented with open source hardware
and software tools. Thus, anybody should be able to
create a DiY eco-aware device ready to participate in the
IoT ecosystem as easy as following a simple tech-recipe [3].
1 http://socialcoffee.morelab.deusto.es/
2 http://twitter.com/
 The paper is organised as follows. In Section II the
background of smart everyday objects, their presence in
social networks and previous related work on environment-
friendly behaviour is reviewed. Section III is devoted to distil
the authors motivations to create eco-aware objects, followed
by the explanation of the @Social cof f ee prototype and the
experiments performed with this appliance in order to collect
energy consumption data. Section IV reviews and discusses
the early obtained results and finally Section V summarises
this paper contributions and opens future perspectives.
II. R EVIEW OF THE EMPIRICAL BODY OF EVIDENCE
Nowadays, many types of appliances and electronics
that can be found in common settings, operate differently
one of each other. Some of them have to be continuously
connected to the mains, e.g. the telephone, which is
activated permanently waiting for a call to trigger a ring
alarm. Others may be switched off while they are not in
use, but continuing connected to the electric grid, will
likely consume some Watts in the so called standby mode.
This is the case of a television, Hi-Fi appliances or an
electric coffee machine. Finally there are devices that do
not require energy at all, even if they are connected, e.g. a
simple radio, a hairdryer or an iron.
The coffee-maker that the authors have in their laboratory
is therefore grouped in the second category, the group of
vampire appliances. As has been introduced before, the
standby power refers to the energy consumed by electronic
and electrical appliances while they are switched off (but
are designed to draw some power). A study of Nipkow et
al. [4] demonstrated that standby power used by everyday
appliances can be as high as 10 to 15 Watts per device or
more. This amount tends to wasting rounding the 10% of the
total of residential consumption which means that about one
third of the total energy consumed in a setting is leaked by
households. These studies have derived to energy regulations
following the One-Watt-Initiative [5] in order to restrict the
standby power of new equipment to not more than one Watt
from 2010.
A. Analysis of Related Work
The aim of this paper is to illustrate how Internet-
connected objects may contribute to reduce energy con-
sumption by giving them a ’voice’ in the social networks.
The authors argue that these communication channels are
appropriate to mutually help human beings to reduce their
ecological footprint. Therefore, this contribution pursues giv-
ing an overview of smart everyday objects, their participation
in social networks, and presenting those that have previously
promoted eco-awareness.
1) Smart Everyday Objects: F. Siegemund presented
in his thesis document [6] ’smart everyday objects’ as
arbitrary items from our everyday environment, such
as a table, a chair, or an appliance, augmented with
information technology embedded in the design. Similar
to this statement Bohn, Mattern et al. [7] argued that
objects become smart when microelectronics and sensing
components are endowed within them.
Focusing on the coffee machines (the object augmented
in this work), the first reported smart coffee-maker was the
Xcoffee [8]; a coffeepot that was connected to the Internet
(before it was even called the Internet) and which provided
information about its status (long before there was Twitter).
In 1991, researchers at University of Cambridge shared a
single coffeepot among several floors. The researchers were
frustrated by the fact that they would often climb several
flights of stairs, only to find the coffeepot empty. They set up
a video-camera that triggered a still image to their desktops
periodically to know the level of coffee in the glass pot.
That coffeepot was a proof of concept for today’s networked
objects and the Internet of Things (IoT). Since then, the
price of processing power has dropped significantly, and a
number of projects are demonstrating the benefits of adding
processors, sensors, and transmitters to a range of objects.
2) Social Devices: This paragraph reviews objects
that, like the @Social cof f ee, are connected to the
social networks and participate actively in them. In a first
approach to such extend appeared the Blogjects [9] which
is a neologism that is meant to focus attention on the
participation of objects in the sphere of networked social
discourse. The most peculiar characteristic of Blogjects
is that they participate in the exchange of ideas in an
assertive way within social networks. Nevertheless, the first
researchers that introduce the concept of Social Devices
were Vázquez and López-de-Ipiña [10]. Now, four years
later we find more and more social objects. For example
Rymble3 of Symplio Ltd, which is a living Internet object
that can show what is happening in Facebook4 (likes,
messages, requests) through movements and sounds in the
real world. Another social device, similar to the presented
object for its DiY-nature, is Botanicalls5 , a gadget that
offers a new channel of communication between plants and
humans, in an effort to promote successful inter-species
understanding.
Twitter has officially become the next big thing in terms
of Internet social phenomena gaining worldwide popularity,
with over 300 million users as of 2011 [11]. Essentially,
Twitter is an Internet service for sharing a 140-character
long messages. Why the 140 character limit? So everyone
can send tweets from their cell-phone as well as from their
computer. But, why not to use this channel to make also
3 http://www.rymble.com/
4 http://www.facebook.com
5 http://www.botanicalls.com/
’Things’ communicate? Similar to this idea the Tweetject authors work by transforming the coffee-maker appliance
term was coined by A. Stanford-Clark when presented as the first eco-aware device. The most important finding
its ’house that tweets’ 6 . Therefore the authors consider before the experiment started was that there is no rationale
Twitter as an interesting enabler platform to bridge the more in the use of the coffee machine among the MORElab
and more closer physical and virtual worlds, enabling our members. And more interestingly, there is no yet a consensus
@Social cof f ee ’talk’ to the world. among them about which operational use mode (see next
3) IoT for Green: There are currently in the market lots section) should be the more appropriate for energy-savings
of physical gadgets and devices, conceived for people’s purposes. Taking into account these premises, the idea of
settings, which are designed to promote eco-awareness. the experiment is three-fold: i) to make coffee-maker users
These devices show the power consumption, mostly into and related people aware of its energy expenditure; ii) to
classical energy measures, i.e. W att.h., of home appliances empirically demonstrate that this coffee-maker does not
applying different visualisation channels: comply at all with the One-Watt-Initiative; and iii) to assert
1) Those which are attached to the wall outlet displaying that intelligent Internet-connected objects may help humans
the e-measure in LCD screens. E.g. Efergy eSocket7 to reduce their overall consumption.
2) Devices that integrates a communication interface For such intends it is mandatory to understand the con-
(wired or wireless) and are able to send data to a sumption of the under study e-appliance, and to make the
concentrator, i.e. PC, screen frame, etc8 . energy visible with dedicated current sensors. Next, it will be
3) More powerful meters with embedded Internet con- explained how a capsule-based coffee-machine really works
nection to send data to the appropriate enterprise web- (its operation modes) and how the authors have came up
site9 with such knowledge.
Nevertheless it has been demonstrated that communicat- A. Operational use modes
ing data by mere physical units is not adequate enough
Figure 1 shows two state diagrams of the operation modes
to incentive an eco-behaviour change [12]. Two gadgets
that an off-the-shelf capsule-based coffee machine performs.
which are similar to the physical interaction model that
the @Social cof f ee performs are The Wattson Solar10 and
Energy Orb11 . They are a good example of ambient inter-
faces. The augmented coffee machine is inspired on them
offering more intuitive feedback mechanisms (i.e. physical
interaction)to incentive users to change their coffee machine
usage-habits. Continuing with more e-gadgets, TED12 or
Onzo13 are sophisticated devices that offer more information
to the user (billing, carbon footprint, etc.) by mixing graphics
with real-time data. Unfortunately those devices are out-
of-the-box solutions and then, they are not configurable
nor personalizable to adequate to user needs or desires. To
overcome such issue the Plogg14 came to the market as a
programmable smart meter that one can control remotely
from anywhere in a building or over a network. It has been
used by Guinard et al. [13] for its integration in the Web of
Things, and by Weiss et al. [14] who proposed a system to
monitor appliances with mobile phones.
Figure 1. Coffee-maker operational use modes.
III. E XPERIMENTATION
One of the main objectives of the presented experiment For the sake of its better understanding, let us describe
is to optimise the energy consumed in the laboratory where the under study coffee maker model. It features a button
6 http://stanford-clark.com/andy house.html
intended to switch it on and switch it off, and a LED light
7 www.efimarket.com/efergy-e2 that shifts from blinking to steady to warn users when the
8 http://www.theowl.com/ device is ready to be used.
9 http://currentcost.com/
In the left side of the Figure 1, ON/OFF Mode, a user has
10 http://www.diykyoto.com/
11 http://www.orbenergy.com
to press the start button since the device was switched off.
12 http://www.theenergydetective.com/ After few seconds of engine warming (blinking LED light)
13 http://onzo.com/ the coffee-machine is ready to use. The user prepares its
14 http://www.plogginternational.com/ hot drink, and finally switches off again the device. The
second operation mode is the Stand-By mode. As can be
appreciated in the right side of the Figure a user will always
find the coffee-maker ready-to-use because the appliance is
permanently working. Thus, no warming time is needed due
to the periodical energy peaks that the device consumes to
maintain the engine’s pressure.
B. Instrumentation
The materials used in this case study are explained below:
1) The everyday object that has been converted into a
smart and social device, @Social cof f ee, is an off-
the-shelf capsule-based coffee machine, namely Dolce
Gustor 15 .
2) An important feature of the @Social cof f ee is that it
is connected to the Internet via an Arduino platform16
powered with an Ethernet shield. This allows the con-
nection of an everyday object with the social network
Twitter, enabling the possibility to automatically send
’tweets’ related to coffee machine’s status such as
consumed energy, water level or number of coffees
made. To implement this functionality, the ThingTweet
application has been used through an Open Source
API, namely ThingSpeak17 .
3) One of the main objectives is to optimise the energy
usage for which it is necessary to know the appliance
consumption. To tackle it, a LEM AT 10 B5 18 current
sensor has been used. This sensor is self-powered
by induction, its maximum amperage is 10A, and
the output, that varies from 0 to 5 volts depending
on the current that is flowing through it, is then
processed by the Arduino microcontroller. Knowing
its current and voltage (220V), the power calculation
is immediate P = V ∗ I (Assuming a null lag between
current and the voltage phase, the reactive power is
negligible for next calculations). Once obtained the
power and knowing the consumption time (t), the
consumed energy can be worked out: E = P ∗ t
4) Finally a micro-SD controlled by the Arduino platform
has been used to store daily separated files with the
everyday energy consumption.
C. Experiment Research Context
Two separated experiments have been accomplished in
a research laboratory. The research group is composed of
thirty members whereof two thirds (considered subjects
under study) used to have hot drinks along the work-day with
the coffee-maker appliance. The laboratory members were
obviously conscious of the experiment (the appearance of the
coffee-machine has been customised with some electronics),
but not for the ultimate goal of trying to change its mindset
15 http://www.dolce-gusto.us
16 http://www.arduino.cc/
17 https://thingspeak.com/
18 http://www.lem.com/
to a more eco-awareness. Therefore, the experiment has been
conducted by letting the freedom to participants to operate
the coffee machine as their convenience.
1) Coffee-Maker Functionality: The former experiment,
was carried on to empirically understood the functionality
of the coffee machine. Thus, to learn how the energy is
consumed in the two presented operational modes. To such
extend the authors used intensively the coffee-maker along a
work-day operating the appliance in every possible manner
that it permits. The Arduino platform and the current sensor
were together switched on continuously cooperating in the
collection of the data fluctuation. This experiment allowed us
to determine and modelise the before presented operational
use modes and their energy implications.
2) Usage Dataset: The latter experiment has been de-
signed with the generation of a dataset to extract the coffee-
maker usage-pattern in mind. This experiment is still in
course but, for the early results presented here, it is good
enough since it allows to demonstrate: the energy impact of
the misuse of the coffee machine, the number of coffees
consumed per day, and the need to make the behaviour
of @Social cof f ee users more eco-aware. This second
experiment is conceptually similar to the former in the
instrumentation design, but the implementation is rather
more complex when collecting the empirical evidence: i)The
coffee-machine needs to be synchronised with an Internet
clock Network Time Protocol (NTP) server; ii)the raw data
collected have to be appropriately formatted to be stored in
the SD for further processing, and iii) the @Social cof f ee
participates in social networks19 by ’tweeting’ its state:
Energy consumed, energy wasted, water level or the coffee
cups filled in a work-day as the Figure 2 sample shows.
Figure 2. A @Social cof f ee ’tweet’ summarising the daily energy
consumed during a work-day.
IV. R ESULTS AND D ISCUSSION
The results of the first experiment have led to the under-
standing of the operational use modes that the Dolce Gustor
performs. As was suspected this information is not included
in the appliance instructions sheet, so a potential user asking
herself about how such device should be appropriately used
will find no responses from manufacturers nor vendors.
The second experiment was paramount to validate the state-
ments discussed in this article. From the data collected
during its execution, the authors have generated several
plots and chart figures that should help the readers to better
19 http://twitter.com/#!/Social Coffee
Figure 3. Each of the points on the graph represents the precise moment
in which a coffee has been prepared.
understand their findings. Figure 3 shows the distribution of
coffees consumed along the time axis during ten days of
data-collection in the laboratory (y-axis). It can be observed
that the coffee-maker usage-pattern is rather uniform, i.e.
the consumption is mostly concentrated between two time
slots: 8h to 12h and 14h to 16h. The most important
observation for energy-saving purposes is the observed lack
of activity between 18h and the 8h of the day after. Also it
is easy to figure out that the 4th and 5th day in Figure 3
may correspond to a week-end in the calendar, explaining
why no coffees were prepared (right column of the Figure
summarises the number of coffees prepared each day). This
finding gives substantial hints about the periods of time that
the coffee appliance should definitely be switched off. The
coffee maker features three types of peaks (standby-peaks,
coffee-peaks, warming-peaks) when it operates. Therefore,
the Figure IV has been plotted to show the overall energy
consumption, classified in these three peak-types, along ten
days of data collection.
Readers may be confused when they realised that the days
the fewer coffees have been made (zero coffees the 4th
and the 5th), the most energy was wasted (461 and 494
Watt.h. respectively). That finding substantiates the initial
author’s argument about the need of a more intelligent
everyday object to help to mitigate the human being absent-
mindedness, i.e. forgetting the appliances ’on’ when these
are not going to be used at all (week-ends or after-work
periods). Moreover the misuse of the coffee-maker has
led to demonstrate that by itself, @Social cof f ee is not
green at all since it exceeds the threshold of the One-
Watt-Initiative above 2000%, i.e. consuming 20,58 Watt in
standby mode. Finally, Figure 5 depicts a zoom of the 1st
day of February, the day when this experiment was launched.
It shows the precise time when different peaks occurred, and
Figure 4. Energy consumed by of each of the peak-types during the first
ten days of February
their corresponding energy consumption, during that day.
This plot discloses the scientific evidence that a reduction
of power consumption is also possible within working hours,
since there are several periods of time (e.g. 10h40-12h),
when the coffee-maker is wasting power operating in the
standby mode with no sense.
Analysing these three graphs’ data and using heuristics,
interesting conclusions can be drawn. As a first approach,
it could be estimated a relevant energy diminution if the
coffee machine had been switched off during the week-ends
and the time where there are no members in the MORElab
(time represented by the black crosses in Figure 5). The
current version of the @Social cof f ee notifies the energy
balance (effective vs. wasted) at the end of the day trying
to persuade its followers to switch-off the appliance in the
referred time.
A smarter, less obvious model could be applied if the
@Social cof f ee would be able to estimate when the usual
idle times happened during a workday (see white crosses in
Figure 5), in order to automatically disconnect itself from
the mains. A savvy reader could notice that a simple clock-
switch would do the trick. However, the authors envision a
more intelligent social coffee machine, that by itself would
be able to commute between the appropriate operational
use modes, promoting then a substantial decrease of energy
usage.
V. C ONCLUSION
The IoT opens a world of inspiring opportunities where
millions of connected objects come to participate in such
ecosystem, which means that all of them will consume
energy. Before this new technological advent the percentage
of energy used by ICT was astonishing high compared
with the overall consumption. Therefore, the paper authors

Figure 5. Power fluctuation during a workday highlighting on the chart-top
the type of each peak.
alert to interested researches, stakeholders and the general
public about the ecological implications that this fact
may cause (carbon footprint, silicon, energy for new
connected devices, etc.). Most of previous research works
have focused on energy-efficiency, low power transceivers
or harvesting methods to cope with energy savings. The
presented study is aligned with them but claiming for a
change of conception in the actors roles. Thus, eco-aware
connected Things cooperating with human beings as the
best team to promote a more sustainable behaviour change
on the planet’s behalf.
This paper has presented an overview of how Internet-
connected objects can lead to a social change towards
energy-awareness in areas where people inhabit (cities,
buildings or homes). For this aim the paper has proposed
the use of social networks, like Twitter, as interaction and
communication channel between smart everyday objects and
human beings.
The coffee-maker prototype is still collecting the usage data.
Therefore the discussed optimisation to a more eco-aware
and intelligent object is kept for a next step beyond this
research work. It is early to asses if the devised persuasion
process and the communication channel are the most appro-
priated to change the MORElab members eco-mindsets. To
such extend, the authors will perform a rigorous validation
experiment as a future work.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors are very grateful to the University of Deusto
for the financial support to their PhD. studies. This paper is
also supported by the Basque Government projects FUTURE
INTERNET II and 4GIZAR. Finally, the authors would also
like to thank Mario Piattini for introducing them to the
experimentation methodologies in the fascinating field of
computer science.
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