An internet of things-based smart energy meter for monitoring device-level consumption of energy

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compeleceng.2020.106772Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We have presented an Internet of Things based smart energy meter that can be deployed in households and industries to measure power consumption at the device level without disrupting the operation of the appliances and without the need for rewiring.

  • The system has been designed to operate as a standalone device that can be placed between the electrical appliance and the mains. It is capable of measuring power consumption irrespective of the consumption patterns in terms of fixed and varying energy consumption.

  • The performance of the system has been tested using a variety of appliances and the accuracy has been validated by comparing it with the already known power rating of the appliance. The performance was evaluated using many household appliances from the categories mentioned previously.

  • The consumers can view, monitor and log the consumption data remotely at the device level. This can help them ensure that their appliances are working well within their expected power ratings, which will contribute towards consumers taking steps toward conscious energy consumption and conservation.

Abstract

The number of household appliances has drastically increased in the recent years and with this, so has the consumption and demand for electricity. In the face of declining energy resources, there is a need for a solution that can help track, measure and control the consumption of electricity. Conventional energy meters do not provide information regarding power consumption at the device-level, due to which consumers cannot monitor or log the electricity consumed by each appliance. To bridge the gap in device energy consumption data, we propose the design and implementation of an Internet of Things (IoT) enabled, minimalistic, cost-effective and efficient smart energy meter which will aid consumers in obtaining information on the energy consumption of any electrical appliance. This will not only assist consumers in ensuring that their devices function as per the energy rating but also help them access energy expenditure patterns formed over time which will contribute towards awareness and conscious conservation of energy.

Introduction

In the current Indian scenario, traditional utility grids are still prevalent. Conventional electric meters supplied by the Government's electricity supply boards measure the power consumption of the whole residence or industry on a monthly basis. This implies that consumers have no means to monitor the power consumption of individual appliances. Due to the lack of communication facility in these meters, consumers cannot access or log the energy consumption either. Also, since the billing system only acknowledges the overall consumption in this setting, consumers are unaware of their daily behavior with respect to energy consumption. This means that they also lack awareness regarding the operational behavior of their electrical appliances [1].

Owing to the advancements in ubiquitous computing and IoT, they are now found in a plethora of applications spanning across numerous fields such as healthcare, home automation, industrial and manufacturing applications, defense systems and environmental monitoring. Since IoT is essentially a large, coherent, integrated network of sensing and communicating devices, it can be used to effectively monitor various parameters, the most crucial of which is energy [2]. IoT enabled energy systems can be used to derive valuable information pertaining to the consumption of energy by every appliance, thereby contributing to conservation of energy by preventing energy losses. This valuable data from the IoT enabled energy network can then be easily accessed and used to identify, analyze and solve different energy related problems in a typical household or industry [3].

The idea behind this paper is to implement such an energy monitoring system through which the consumer can be equipped with information of the energy expenditure of individual or multiple electrical appliances [4]. This will help them ascertain an expenditure pattern at the device-level and use this data to consciously manage their energy consumption. Also, this information can be used by the consumer to detect and replace faulty and energy-intensive appliances with their energy efficient counterparts.

This paper is organized as follows: the Section 2 is a detailed account of background and related work. The meter's design, operation as well as the implementation are detailed in Section 3. In Section 4, the performance analysis and results for the smart energy meter are presented, and the paper is concluded in Section 5.

Section snippets

Background and related work

Electrical devices that are equipped to detect and display energy consumed in the form of readings are termed as electric meters or electricity meters. Traditional meters have been in widespread use since the late 19th century. In an electric grid, these electric meters might also be equipped to handle the data exchange between electronic devices and may be involved in both production and distribution of electricity.

Conventional electricity meters are of two distinct types - single phase energy

System design

On the basis of the drawbacks determined in the survey of literature, the following are the design objectives identified for the proposed smart energy meter:

  • To develop a plug-in and use device which can be easily incorporated in any household or industry.

  • Provide an objective and accurate measure of the energy consumed by individual devices.

  • Provide remote monitoring of the energy consumption over the Internet.

  • Provide an affordable, efficient solution towards making consumers aware about their

Results and performance evaluation

The performance of the system was tested using a variety of appliances and the accuracy was validated by comparing it with the already known power rating of the appliance. The performance evaluation was carried out using 2 types of appliances - those that have a fixed power consumption and devices that have varying power consumption on the basis of the load over a fixed time period. The corresponding ThingSpeak channel outputs are also provided.

Conclusion

In this work, we have presented an Internet of Things-based smart energy meter that can be deployed in households and industries to measure power consumption at the device-level without disrupting the current operation of the appliances and without the need for complex rewiring. The smart energy meter is cost-effective to build since it uses Arduino Uno along with a WiFi module and a current sensor. During the testing of the system, it was found to be capable of extracting energy expenditure

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Shishir Muralidhara: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Investigation, Writing - original draft. Niharika Hegde: Methodology, Software, Investigation, Writing - review & editing, Visualization. Rekha PM: Supervision.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Shishir Muralidhara graduated from JSS Academy of Technical Education, Bangalore and received his Bachelor of Engineering degree from Visvesvaraya Technological University. He is currently pursuing M.Sc in Computer Science at Technische Universität Kaiserslautern. His-research interests include Internet of Things, Cyber-Physical systems, Smart Homes and Cities.

References (27)

  • D.B. Avancini et al.

    Energy meters evolution in smart grids: a review

    J Clean Prod

    (2019)
  • P.D. Diamantoulakis et al.

    Big data analytics for dynamic energy management in smart grids

    Big Data Res

    (2015)
  • S. Bimenyimana et al.

    Traditional vs smart electricity metering systems: a brief overview

    J Mark Consum Res

    (2018)
  • A. Khadar et al.

    Research advancements towards in existing smart metering over smart grid

    Int J Adv Comput Sci Appl

    (2017)
  • B. Regassa et al.

    Upgrading of traditional electric meter into wireless electric meter using ZigBee technology

  • Smart Metering deployment in the European Union Available:...
  • Q. Sun et al.

    A comprehensive review of smart energy meters in intelligent energy networks

    IEEE Internet Things J.

    (2016)
  • D. Alahakoon et al.

    Smart electricity meter data intelligence for future energy systems: a survey

    IEEE Trans Ind Inform

    (2016)
  • C. Gu et al.

    Design and Implementation of energy data collection system using wireless fidelity (WiFi) module and -current transformer

  • L. Li et al.

    Design of an ARM-based power meter having WIFI wireless communication module

  • Ali, A., Saad, N.H., Razali, N.A., Vitee, N., Implementation of Automatic Meter Reading (AMR) using radio frequency...
  • S. Kim et al.

    A secure smart-metering protocol over power-line communication

    IEEE Trans Power Deliv

    (2011)
  • A.H. Shajahan et al.

    Data acquisition and control using Arduino-Android platform: smart plug

  • Cited by (40)

    View all citing articles on Scopus

    Shishir Muralidhara graduated from JSS Academy of Technical Education, Bangalore and received his Bachelor of Engineering degree from Visvesvaraya Technological University. He is currently pursuing M.Sc in Computer Science at Technische Universität Kaiserslautern. His-research interests include Internet of Things, Cyber-Physical systems, Smart Homes and Cities.

    Niharika Hegde graduated from JSS Academy of Technical Education, Bangalore and received her Bachelor of Engineering degree from Visvesvaraya Technological University. She is currently pursuing her M.Sc in Computer Science at Technische Universität Kaiserslautern. Her research interests include Internet of Things, Medical Image Processing and Bioinformatics.

    Rekha PM is currently working as an Associate Professor at Department of Information Science and Engineering, JSS Academy of Technical Education, Bangalore and has eighteen years of teaching experience. She has published in five journals, ten conferences and a book chapter. She is a member of IRED, IAENG, ISTE.

    This paper is for regular issues of CAEE. Reviews processed and recommended for publication to the Editor-in-Chief by Associate Editor Dr. Hui Tian.

    View full text