Design and Implementation of Low-Cost Real-Time Energy Logger for Industrial and Home Applications

Abstract

With the significant increase in energy demands in the last decade, the issues of unnecessary energy usage have increased rapidly. Therefore, there is an immediate need to provide a cheap and easily accessible monitoring tool for the energy consumed by an appliance used in homes and industries. Instead of monitoring the total power consumption of the houses and/or industries, it is useful to monitor the power consumption of the individual appliance, which in turn, helps in saving the overall energy usage and thereby makes it cost-effective. This paper presents a cost-efficient design and implementation of a monitoring system that can precisely measure the current and voltage of each appliance. The design provides tracking of device activity in a real-time environment for the industries and helps in adopting to the green initiative. The design comprises of Arduino based micro-controller and Raspberry Pi, that performs precise measurements of current and voltage of the device, followed by measuring the power consumed by the device. This paper presents two different system designs, one for the single-phase measurements and the other for the DC measurements. The single-phase measurement device comprises of 10-bit ADC whereas, the 24 V DC measurement device comprises of a 12-bit ADC, which provides higher measurement accuracy compared to other systems available in the market. The implemented design uses the EmonCMS web application to accumulate and envision the monitored data. It provides a flexible and user-friendly solution to monitor the measured data easily on any android or iOS devices.