Can non-intrusive load monitoring be used for identifying an appliance's anomalous behaviour?

•Ruled-based algorithm to detect anomalies in compressor based appliances.•Evaluation of the viability of NILM for anomaly detection.•Experiments using publicly available four NILM algorithms and three datasets.•Analysis of correlation between NILM accuracy and resulting anomaly detection.•Discussion of further steps to facilitate effective anomaly detection using NILM.