Abstract—Energy expenditure has been a severe concern in domestic and industrial sectors for the past few decades. The first step towards conservation of energy is to monitor the amount of energy consumed and utilizing the information to control the expenditure. In this paper, we propose an energy consumption monitoring and electrical appliance control system to reduce the energy expenditure levels. The system consists of an energy usage monitoring equipment, decision making and control system, information management system and an end-user application. Integrating the system with Internet of Things provides peculiar advantages of data monitoring over the cloud and the amount of time reduced in monitoring. Real time measurement of voltage and current of each electrical appliance is monitored separately and the power consumed is uploaded to the cloud. The presence of humans is kept a count on and the basic electrical appliances like lights, fans and air conditioners are controlled with a decision based on number of humans inside a particular room. Furthermore, the electrical appliances can also be controller by the user using an Android application over Bluetooth communication to enhance the control of electrical appliances.
Index Terms—Energy expenditure, Decision making, Control System, Internet of Things, Bluetooth
I. INTRODUCTION Energy conservation policy is an important part of energy management and defines the process of energy consumed through elimination of electrical appliances when no longer in use and rational usage of electricity by an individual or a household. Energy monitoring has become an important aspect as energy consumption has been exponentially increasing every day due to the rise in energy demand per capita In India, the electricity consumption levels have increased by an alarming rate of 5.55% from 2014-15 to 2015-16 [1]. Three billion units of power is being wasted in India as per the statistics in 2015. The country’s growing energy demand cannot be solved by innovating renewable energy resources but also depends upon conservation of energy. India requires a larger resource for energy to handle it’s rising energy demand per capita in the forthcoming decades. Hence, efficient energy monitoring and management system plays a crucial role in the society.
Design and Implementation of Energy Monitoring and Electrical Appliance Control System using Internet of Things
The objective of this paper is to present an energy monitoring system using the Internet of things and a novel decision making and control system to provide electricity to electrical appliances depending on the presence of people inside a particular room. The need for an innovative energy monitoring system is required to assess the energy consumption levels and intimate the user with the data collected by the system. Energy expenditure has to be controlled and unnecessary usage of electrical appliances must be cut down in order to reduce the energy dissipation levels. The power consumed by every electrical appliance must be monitored in order to efficiently control the usage of electricity. The presence of people inside a room is detected using a bi-ultrasonic sensor system which results in counting the number of entries and exits for a room. The electrical appliances are controlled according to the varying count of people inside a room and depending upon the user’s pre-programmed conditions, the decision is made on which appliances must be turned on and off. The system is setup over the door of a room which gives an edge over the passive infrared based human presence monitoring system.
Internet of things is broad range of technology which brings multiple devices together uniquely identified by an IP address that can manipulate a system with the help of sensors, actuators and use cases defined by the end-user. The Internet of Things is a technology that facilitates control and access over information more secure and easier. Internet of things has transformed many domains to a smarter technology and gives an edge for systems related to information management. The electricity consumed by every appliance is uploaded to the cloud to track the data at any given time. Further, the user can control the appliances based on an Android application over Bluetooth communication with the system.
II. SYSTEMATIC ASSESSMENT OF EXISTING MODELS Internet of Things technology uses machine-to-machine communication (M2M) upgrades and includes wireless sensors and wireless actuators that help users monitor and control remote devices. A voltage divider is used a voltage sensor and 20A ACS712 Current sensor with a voltage sensitivity of 66- 185 mV/A is used to sense the current in the appliance. Arduino Nano is used to process the data and convert from analog to
digital data. A web-based application is developed to monitor the electrical data in the building with an accuracy of 95.5% [2]. NodeMCU is a LUA programming based microcontroller similar to that of an Arduino UNO R3 microcontroller, but contains an inbuilt ESP8266 Wi-Fi module. An optical sensor is used to detect the light intensity in the LED attached to the residential energy meter and calculate the overall energy consumed in the household. After the data is processed by the microcontroller, the IP is configured and authentication process takes place with the cloud. An android application bot is developed for the user to view the energy monitoring levels in the household [3].
The current sensor ACSCT-013-030, a 30A current sensor module is used to collect raw analog data from the electrical appliance and send it to the Arduino Nano microcontroller where the data is converted to digital form. The processed data is sent to the cloud with a network connection provided by the ESP8266 module. A real time clock module RTCD3231 is connected to include the time when the data is processed and uploaded to the cloud [4].
The Arduino UNO R3 Microcontroller is connected to the ACS712 Current sensor to collect data from the electrical appliances. The processed data is displayed to the user in two ways, one is through the 16*2-character Liquid Crystal display and from the cloud, where the data is uploaded via the ESP8266 Wi-Fi module [5].
III. PROPOSED SYSTEM This section explains the methodology and structure of the proposed system. The data on how much electricity is being consumed by each electrical appliance is monitored and the energy wasted when people are not inside a particular room is collected. The cloud acts as an interface tool between the user and the system which provides the electricity consumption and wastage data on a real-time basis. Electrical appliances are controlled automatically according to the presence of people inside a particular room. Further, the user can also control the appliances using an Android application over 2.4 GHz Bluetooth version 2.0. Arduino UNO R3 Microcontroller is used to process the analog data collected and convert it to digital data. The proposed system is divided into three parts.
A. Bi-Ultrasonic Human Counter
The Arduino UNO R3 Microcontroller is connected to two HC-SR04 Ultrasonic sensors to for a bi-ultrasonic human counter to count the number of people entering and exiting a particular room. The ultrasonic sensors have pins TRIG and ECHO, which provide the information of detection using the elapsed duration of time. A novel decision making system is designed to calculate the entry and exit of people precisely.
The two ultrasonic sensors are placed in such a way that it detects only human motion by adjusting the detection range according to the door’s height. One sensor is placed in front of the door acting as the entry sensor and the other is placed behind the door acting as the exit sensor. Once the entry sensor is triggered, the exit sensor waits until it receives back the detection signal and once detection occurs, the number of people inside the room increases by one. Similarly, once the exit sensor is triggered, the entry sensor waits until the detection
signal is received and when it is triggered the number of people inside the room is reduced by one.
The electrical appliances such as lights, fans and air conditioners are controlled automatically according to the program flashed to the microcontroller. By default, when number of people inside the room is zero, the electrical appliances remain switched off and when the count increases and remains in a positive value greater than zero, the electrical appliance remains in a switched on state. The switch on and off action is controlled by a 10A Relay module with the NO logic connected to one phase of the electrical appliance and 230V, 50Hz A.C supply connected to the other terminal. Fig.1 represents the circuit diagram of the Bi-ultrasonic human counter system.
The HC-SR04 Ultrasonic sensor has four pins: VCC, TRIG, ECHO and GND. The VCC pin is for the +5V power supply and GND pin is for the ground. The TRIG and ECHO pins are used to detect the elapsed time of detection, which positively sends the data about the distance of the object from the sensor. The Relay input pin is connected to the microcontroller by which the electrical appliance can be controlled using the relay. Table 1 represents the wiring of the sensors and relay to the microcontroller.
Arduino UNO R3
Ultrasonic Sensors and Microcontroller Pins
Relay Pins 5V Entry Sensor VCC GND Entry Sensor GND D13 Entry Sensor TRIG D12 Entry Sensor ECHO 5V Exit Sensor VCC GND Exit Sensor GND D3 Exit Sensor TRIG D2 Exit Sensor ECHO 5V Relay VCC GND Relay GND D7 Relay INPUT
The D13, D12, D7, D3 and D2 pins are digital pins of the Arduino UNO R3 Microcontroller which receives only digital inputs from the ultrasonic sensors and sends digital output to the 10A/230V AC Relay to switch on and off the appliance.
TABLE I BI-ULTRASONIC HUMAN COUNTER CIRCUIT WIRING DESCRIPTION
Fig. 1. Bi-Ultrasonic Human Counter System Circuit Diagram
B. Energy Monitoring System
The electricity consumed by the electrical appliance can be calculated by measuring the voltage and current through the appliance. A 30A ACS712 Current Sensor is used to measure the voltage and current. The current sensor sends a raw value to the Arduino UNO R3 Microcontroller which is converted to its respective voltage and current values.
The AC voltage of the electrical appliance can be measure by,
Vpp = (
1024 R
) ∗ 5000 (1)
Vrms = (
Vpp 2
) ∗ 0.707 (2) Where, V
pp
is the peak to peak voltage in V V
rms
is the root mean square voltage in V R is the Raw value
The AC current of the electrical appliance can be measure by,
I = (
Vrms 1000
) ∗ mvperAmp (3) Where, I is the current in Amperes mvperAmp is equal to 66 for 30A ACS712 Module
Fig. 2 show the ACS712 Current sensor interfaced with the Arduino UNO R3 Microcontroller.
Table 2 shows the connection description between the current sensor and the microcontroller.
The Vout pin of the current sensor provides raw data in the form of analog data to the microcontroller which is further processed with the help of the equations (1), (2) and (3) to obtain the voltage and current of the electrical appliance. The power consumed by the electrical appliance for a particular time can be calculated as follows,
P = V ∗ I ∗ t (4) Where,
ACS712 Arduino UNO R3
Current Microcontroller Pins
Sensor Pins 5V VCC GND GND A0 Vout
TABLE II ENERGY MONITORING SYSTEM CIRCUIT WIRING DESCRIPTION
Fig. 2. Energy Monitoring System Circuit Diagram
P is the power consumption in KWh V is the voltage in V I is the current in A t is the on time in hours
The data collected by the Microcontroller is uploaded to the Thingspeak cloud using an Ethernet Shield connected to the Arduino UNO R3. A private Thingspeak channel is created with a unique API Key for the data to be uploaded and the channel is created in private mode to enhance data security. The microcontroller is fed with the channel URL and API Key to access the channel and upload the processed data which is depicted to the user via graphical representation.
C. User control over Electrical appliances
During certain situations when the user faces a dilemma over control of electrical appliances, an additional feature of manual control of electrical appliances has been accomplished over Bluetooth communication protocol. An Android application is developed to communicate with the Arduino UNO R3 Microcontroller. The electrical appliances are connected to the microcontroller through the 10A Relay module. Fig.3 shows the structure of user control over electrical appliances.
Fig. 3. User Appliance Control System Structure
The Arduino UNO R3 Microcontroller is connected to the HC-05 Bluetooth Module to gain access to Bluetooth communication protocol. When the system is switched on, the Bluetooth device is discoverable with the HC-05. Once the Bluetooth connection is established between the user end application and the Microcontroller, the user can send commands to the microcontroller through the application. Unique commands are set for every button in the application. Once a button is pressed, the command is sent to the microcontroller through a serial input and the resultant process is performed. Fig 4. shows the circuit diagram for the user appliance control system.
Table 3 shows the connection description of the user appliance control system.
Fig 5. shows the user interface of the user end Android application.
HC-05 Arduino UNO R3
Bluetooth Module and Microcontroller Pins
Relay Pins 5V HC-05 VCC GND HC-05 GND D0/RXD HC-05 TXD D1/TXD HC-05 RXD 5V Relay VCC GND Relay GND D8 Relay INPUT
TABLE II USER APPLIANCE CONTROL SYSTEM CIRCUIT WIRING DESCRIPTION
Fig. 4. User Appliance Control System Circuit Diagram
Fig. 5. Android Application User Interface
Fig.6 shows the Android application’s back end block diagram describing the operations of each button in the user interface. The command for every button as shown in Fig. 6 is sent to the Microcontroller serially as the user input.
IV. RESULTS AND ANALYSIS The Bi-Ultrasonic Human Counter system counts the number of entries and exits respectively and identifies the number of people inside the room by calculating the difference between the number of entries and exits. The electrical appliance connected to the system is switched on when the number of people inside the room is greater than or equal to one. Fig. 6 shows the circuit of the Bi-Ultrasonic Human Counter system.
Fig. 6. Android Application Back End Block Diagram
Fig. 6 a) Appliances in OFF State during zero presence b) Appliances in ON State when presence is detected
Fig. 7 shows the output display of the system in Arduino IDE’s serial monitor. When the presence of people inside a particular room is not found, the electrical appliances are switched off to save power. When people enter the room the appliance is switched on for user convenience and hence conservation of energy is accomplished by implementation of this system.
The ACS712 Current sensor is connected to the Arduino UNO R3 Microcontroller along with the Ethernet shield. The raw value obtained from the current sensor is processed by the microcontroller and the respective voltage, current, power and energy consumption is calculated and uploaded to the Thingspeak cloud. Fig. 8 shows the circuit of the Energy monitoring system.
Fig. 9 graphically represents the voltage, current, power and energy consumed by the electrical appliance in the Thingspeak Cloud environment. The microcontroller is connected to the Thingspeak Cloud by accessing the Thingspeak API URL (api.thingspeak.com) and connecting to the user’s channel by a unique API key provided in the program.
Fig. 8. ACS712 Current Sensor connected to the Arduino UNO R3 and Ethernet Shield
Fig. 7. Bi-Ultrasonic Human Counter Output Display in Arduino Serial Monitor
The user can also control the electrical appliances by communicating with Arduino UNO R3 microcontroller via Bluetooth protocol. The HC-05 Bluetooth module is connected to enable the microcontroller to transmit and receive via Bluetooth. Fig. 10 shows the connection control of the microcontroller to the Android application. The Hc-05 Bluetooth module is paired with the user end device and the Android application is used to connect to the microcontroller. Once the connection has been established successfully, the user can control the digital outputs to the 10A Relay module and hence controlling the electrical appliances via Bluetooth. 2.4 GHz Bluetooth version 2.0 is used in this communication protocol between HC-05 and the Android application.
Fig. 9. Data uploaded to the Thingspeak Cloud Environment
Fig. 11. ACS712 Current Sensor connected to the Arduino UNO R3 and Ethernet Shield
Fig. 10. Bluetooth connection successfully established between microcontroller and Android application
V. CONCLUSION Energy monitoring and conservation is an important step to be taken in every residential and commercial buildings. The proposed system has been developed in a minimized cost and successfully accomplished the requirements of an energy monitoring system. The user can also control the electrical appliances according to his convenience to reduce electrical energy consumption in the household. The Internet of Things provides the system with an added peculiar advantage of reduction in time of monitoring data in real-time. The developed system has a major advantage of reducing human interference and automating the task of switching electrical appliances according to the environmental changes. Installation of the developed system in residential and commercial buildings reduces the electrical consumption rate and the electricity charges per annum considerably. Hence the developed system provides an efficient and compact energy monitoring and electrical appliance control system.
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