A Household Energy Efficiency Index Assessment Method Based on Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring Data
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
With reference to the manuscript titled “Household Energy Efficiency Index Assessment Method Based on Non-intrusive Load Monitoring Data” (Manuscript ID: 788056), I believe that the manuscript provides good contributions in terms of quality and originality; however, it requires a deep review by authors to fix some formal issues and contents shortcomings and thus improve the legibility of the manuscript. In particular, the main issues found in the manuscript are the following:
- Line 33. Is it necessary to use capital letters for the sentence “the 13th Five-Year Plan of Comprehensive Work for Energy Saving and Emission Reduction”?
- The authors are advised to clarify all the acronyms at the first appearance.
- The authors are recommended to review the bibliographic reference citations (e.g. [21], [24]), and the correspondent citation inside the manuscript (line 21 "Roberto et al……..”).
- Relatively to Figure 1, the authors are advised to improve the legibility of the figure.
- The authors are recommended to carried out a deep review of the whole manuscript to fix the several grammar issues and typos present in the manuscript.
- The authors are advised to review the manuscript in order to improve the English language.
- Relatively to Figure 3, the authors are advised to improve the legibility of the graphs, being too small.
- Line 201. Is it necessary to use capital letters for the sentence “the feature-additive Criterion (FAC)”?.
- Relatively to Figure 7, the authors are advised to specify the sampling period used to acquire the power of different types of electrical appliances.
- Line 495. The authors are advised to review the figures citations in the manuscript in order to comply with the journal template (for further information see https://0-www-mdpi-com.brum.beds.ac.uk/journal/applsci/instructions).
- Relatively to Figures 12 and 13, the authors are advised to improve the legibility of the graphs.
For these reasons, I suggest the acceptance of the manuscript after minor revision.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
- It is written in the manuscript: "Compared with other evaluation methods, the evaluation method in
this paper needs further improvement and in-depth research." - It seems to me that the manuscript authors are right.
- I would propose to postpone the publication till the in-depth research would be performed.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Reviewer 3 Report
This work present a useful way of energy efficiency index assessment. The paper can be useful to the readers but there few observations which can be useful to make the manuscript more effective.
1) There is a need to improve overall English/language quality. Examples are:
-a) Lines 30-31- "In the past decade, China's economy has developed rapidly in the train of a series of 30 environmental problems". Please rephrase such sentences it the paper.
b) Lines 153-154 "Smart meters with intrusive load monitoring technology is used to obtain the information electricity use". "is" should be replaced with "are". There are numerous other places in the manuscript where it needs correction to make the language better for making the manuscript better.
2) Quality of all the figures can be improved to have better readability. For example, in figure 2, the text "User classification" is overlapping the box which is supposed to be enclosing the text. Also, Figs 3, 8, 10, 12, 13 could be resized (in terms of aspect ratio) to the use the white space effectively which will also help to make these figures more readable and understandable. I understand that these changes are minor but I strongly think that these changes are very important for the overall effectiveness and quality of the paper.
3) In the case-study section, the data collected is the daily electricity consumption data of 20 users within 30 days, including the electricity consumption information of 46 appliances. Please include the implication of the findings if the sample size would have been bigger. Like 100 or 500 users. I understand that would have been difficult implement in case study but at least the authors should include discussion about implication of sample sizes on the there results. This would broaden the scope of inferences drawn from the data.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Reviewer 4 Report
The authors have provided a systematic approach towards analyzing the various parameters and electrical appliances in terms of energy consumption for residential users, they have examined the generated results in a very detailed manner by graphical representation and theoretical explanations. And also provided significant contributions in a much needed field of energy for efficient energy consumption and related decision making.
Point 1: Line: 33 – 36: Reference required.
Point 2: Line: 103 – 104: Redundant information, please make it succinct.
Point 3: Line: 171: Reference required.
Point 4: Line: 216: Thesis?
Point 5: Line: 265 – 266: Please elaborate regarding 2 types of wind power?
Point 6: Why new energy information is added, is it necessary to have it if any user would like to follow this proposed model, specifically regarding C2 parameter.
Point 7: Why TOPSIS method is used, why not any other like; VIKOR (VIekriterijumsko KOmpromisno Rangiranje).
Point 8: In terms of comprehensive evaluation, the entropy weight method has been utilized, what about AHP (Analytical Hierarchy Process) method, or combined AHP-Entropy method for better decision making.
Point 9: What if a new electrical appliance has been added by the user in their home and it’s not listed as one of the 51 appliances attributed in the proposed system, how it will be managed?
Point 10: How users will add/update their information? Will it be through any specific system associated application or any smart phone App? How users are going to access and enroll themselves under energy efficiency system and make use of their services.
Point 11: Apart from only suggesting users for reducing power consumption, how energy harvesting will be utilized in this proposed setup? Will it be off grid entirely, and only harvested energy consumption through efficient energy method will be suggested, or it will be hybrid energy generation and consumption will be done accordingly.
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
Please see the attachment.Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
The present manuscript is the same manuscript that was submitted for the first time.
Therefore, my opinion is also the same.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer:
On behalf of my co-authors, we thank you very much for your positive and constructive comments and suggestions on our manuscript, which is valuable and very helpful for revising and improving our paper, as well as of important guiding significance to our researches.
We thought carefully about the problems you pointed out in the first revision process and made improvements in the revised draft. Unfortunately, we uploaded the wrong file for peer-to-peer response comments, which led the experts to believe that the paper was not improved. This is our negligence and fault, and hope you forgive us. A thousand thanks!
The researches of this manuscript are mostly from the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2016YFB0901104), which topic is "Electric Power Supply and Demand of Interactive Service Platform". The key technology researches include the content analysis of power users, emergency scheduling, virtual load, demand response targets such as power supply and demand of interaction process and strategy, and so on. Part of the research from the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant (51877145), which research contents are the technologies of household user information measurement and non-intrusive load monitoring.
The proposed method has been preliminarily verified in cities of Tianjin, Suzhou and Changzhou of JIANGSU province in China, and some good results have been obtained.
Once again, thank you very much for your comments and suggestions.
Best wishes!
Corresponding authors
More details are in the point to point author response for reviewer and the highlighted in blue in the modification manuscript.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
