A Versatile High Frequency Electricity Monitoring Framework for Our Future Connected Home

Abstract

In our homes a lot of devices are powered by electricity without us knowing the specific amount. As electricity production has a large, negative environmental impact, we should be more aware about how devices consume power and how we can adapt our daily routine to decrease our electricity requirements. Methods such as Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) can provide the user with precise device level electricity data by measuring at a single point in a houses’ electricity network. However, the time resolution of most off-the-shelf power meters is not sufficient for NILM or the meters are locked down for security reasons. Therefore, we have developed our own versatile energy metering framework which consists of a high frequency electricity metering device, a versatile backend for data processing and a webapp for data visualization. The developed hardware is capable of sampling up to 32 kHz, while the software framework allows to extract other power related metrics such as harmonic content. The system’s application ranges from providing transparent electricity usage to the user up to generating load forecasts with fine granularity.