Smart Energy and Utility Monitoring System

Introduction

Presently, electrical energy consumption from users in an area is monitored and calculated by frequent field visits done by technicians from the electricity department for the calculation of energy fare. This is a time-consuming task as there will be thousands of houses in an area and numerous apartments in the same flats. When it comes to a city or town, this is a very hectic process. There is no provision to check or analyze the individual energy consumption of houses in a period of time nor to create a report of energy flow in a certain area. This is just the case throughout many places in the world.

There are no existing solutions implemented to tackle the above problem. We are proposing a smart energy monitoring system that will ease the inspection, monitoring, analysis, and calculation of energy fare. The proposed system will additionally allow generating user specific or area specific charts and reports to analyze the energy consumption and energy flow.

Smart Energy and Utility Monitoring System

The Particle Argon module and the Xenon are given a unique user code to identify the particular housing unit or area where the energy consumption has to be measured. The power consumption will be monitored by these modules with the help of a convenient grove current sensor interfaced using the analog connection.

A Mesh Gateway/Cloud service is be set up by the Energy Department with the help of Argon to which the client Xenon modules are connected to. The energy consumption data, the unique user code and the location (fixed for each device) of the module will be uploaded to this Mesh/Cloud network periodically. The data from the mesh can be accessed and analyzed to calculate individual energy consumption, generate individual and collective energy charts, generate energy reports and for detailed energy inspection.

The whole area under consideration will be divided into cell blocks inside the mesh network for easy management of data as shown below. The blocks are chosen in such a way that the Particle device present in that block will be able to cover the whole block and each block will try to accommodate at least one Particle device to have larger coverage of operation.

This solution also employs a tamper-proof activation/deactivation service for the utilities through the Argon module. These are used by the municipality/authorized personnel to activate/deactivate the electricity distribution box in case the previous dues were unpaid for a long period or because of a report regarding any illegal usage of the utility. The client will also be able to activate/deactivate certain appliances (once they are connected to the Argon module via relay) if the Energy consumption goes beyond a threshold limit.

Workflow

Power from the AC mains is drawn and passed through the current sensor which is integrated into the household circuit. The AC current passing through the load is sensed by the grove current sensor module and the output data from the sensor is fed to the analog pin of the Argon module. Once the analog input is received, the measurement of power/energy is inside the program. The calculated energy is then published to the mesh network. The information is also displayed on the display module. Separate relays are provided for each house which are controlled from the Energy house.

Setup

In AC circuit analysis, both voltage and current vary sinusoidal with time.

Real Power (P): This is the power used by the device to produce useful work. It is expressed in kW.

Real Power = Voltage (V) x Current (I) x cosΦ

Reactive Power (Q) : This is often called imaginary power which is a measure of power oscillates between source and load, that does no useful work.It is expressed in kVA.

Reactive Power = Voltage (V) x Current (I) x sinΦ

Apparent Power (S) : It is defined as the product of the Root-Mean-Square (RMS) Voltage and the RMS Current. This can also be defined as the resultant of real and reactive power. It is expressed in kVA

Apparent Power = Voltage (V) x Current (I)

Relation between Real, Reactive and Apparent power:

Real Power = Apparent Power x cosΦ

Reactive Power = Apparent Power x sinΦ

We are concerned only on the Real power for the analysis.

Power Factor (pf) : The ratio of the real power to the apparent power in a circuit is called the power factor.

Power Factor = Real Power/Apparent Power

Thus, we can measure all form of power as well as power factor by measuring the voltage and current in the circuit. Following section discusses the steps taken to obtain the measurements that are required to calculate the energy consumption.

The AC current is conventionally measured by using a Current transformer. The Current Sensor is a Hall Effect current sensor that accurately measures current when induced. The magnetic field around the AC wire is detected which gives the equivalent analog output voltage. The analog voltage output is then processed by the micro controller to measure the current flow through the load.

Hall Effect is the production of a voltage difference (the Hall voltage) across an electrical conductor, transverse to an electric current in the conductor and a magnetic field perpendicular to the current.

The output from the Current Sensor is an analog signal proportional to the current passing through it. The following calculation are done:

• Measuring the peak to peak voltage ( Vpp )
• Divide the peak to peak voltage(Vpp) by two to get peak voltage (Vp)
• Multiply Vp by 0.707 to get the rms voltage (Vrms)
• Multiply the Sensitivity of the current sensor to get the rms current.

Vp = Vpp/2

Vrms = Vp x 0.707

Irms = Vrms x Sensitivity

The sensitivity for current module is 200 mV/A.

Real Power (W) = Vrms x Irms x pf

Vrms = 230V (known )

pf = 0.85 (known)

Irms = Obtained using above calculation

For calculating the energy cost, the power in watts is converted into energy:

Wh = W * (time / 3600000.0)

Watt hour a measure of electrical energy equivalent to a power consumption of one watt for one hour.

For kWh:

kWh = Wh / 1000

The Total Energy cost is:

Cost = Cost per kWh * kWh.

All connections are standard Grove connections with individual layout as follows:

• Current Sensor => A0
• Relay Module => D4
• Display Unit => D2, D3

The Particle dashboard is updated with the live energy usage statistics.

The dashboard also contains the web element for controlling the relay modules remotely.

Testing

See this in action

Future Plans

An app will be created to access the SEUMS cloud data to monitor user energy consumption in real-time and to view or generate energy analysis reports.