A non-intrusive low-cost kit for electric power measuring and energy disaggregation

Abstract

This article presents a kit to collect data of electric loads of single and three phases main power supply of a house and perform the energy disaggregation. To collect the data, we use sensors based on an open magnetic core to measure the electromagnetic field induced by the current in the electric conducting wire in a non-intrusive way. In particular, each sensor from the three-phase device wraps/encloses each phase without alignment. To calibrate the three-phase device, we present a method to calculate the neutral RMS without complex numbers using (Analysis of Variance) ANOVA and post hoc Tukey's multiple comparison tests to assert the differences of measures among phases. We managed to validate the method using a measure reference. Additionally, to perform the energy disaggregation, we use the NILMTK tool. This tool compares disaggregation algorithms on many public datasets. We use in our system two disaggregation algorithms Combinatorial Optimization and Factorial Hidden Markov Model algorithms. The results show that is possible to collect and perform energy disaggregation through our embedded system.