An IoT-based home appliances ecosystem to improve energy use efficiency

Abstract

Sometimes people need to use many appliances simultaneously inside a house, but the electrical power is limited. When the power used by the appliances exceeds the available power limit, the circuit breaker will be shutting off. To overcome this, the users will usually turn off unnecessary appliances manually and causes inconvenience to the users. This paper proposes a household appliances ecosystem with the concept of IoT to overcome the previously mentioned conditions. The proposed ecosystem consists of monitoring and power controllers for every appliance, a local MQTT broker, and a local server on the Raspberry Pi SoC device. These components are connecting via LAN. The power used by each appliance will be monitored and continuously broadcast to the ecosystem through the MQTT broker. The users can monitor the power usage of every device and control it from the web interface. Users can determine whether it is safe to turn on another device to avoid power cut-off using the power usage information. This decision is improving the user experience and energy use efficiency.