Technological Innovation of a Comprehensive System to Monitor Electric Consumption

Abstract

The present work focused on the design and implementation of an integral system to monitor, locally and remotely, the electrical consumption in the different areas within a home. In this way, it was considered to create a prototype capable of measuring every minute, the current consumed by the different loads connected to the electrical network of a household. A wireless network based on Zigbee technology was used to transmit the data of electric consumption from the prototype to a server. The data is processed and subsequently stored in a database. Finally, a web page was developed that graphically shows a history of electricity consumption, which the user can ac-cess locally or remotely to quickly and practically monitor the electricity consumption within the house-hold. For the development of this integral system, the operation of current sensors, voltage dividers, Xbee modules was analyzed, and the application was developed with the use of Open Source software such as Java, MySQL and PHP. Currently, the user only has the monthly readings, delivered by the electricity service provider, ignoring the reality about critical environments within the household. Through the pro-posed system, the user can know at any place and at any time the electricity consumption generated in specific areas, and thus take appropriate actions for energy saving.