Arduino Based Smart Power Meter: A Low-cost Approach for Academic and Research Applications

Abstract

Energy consumption has increased significantly over the past century, which has brought several bad conditions for the environment. One way to reduce these adverse consequences of energy consumption from Earth is to make smarter and more efficient use of it, and measuring energy is an essential task to accomplish it. A detailed measurement of power consumption at non-industrial level is often excessively expensive. This paper presents the design and implementation of an Arduino-based low-cost smart power meter, as an affordable alternative. An evaluation of the Arduino-based smart power meter performance is carried out by comparing its measurements against measurements obtained by a commercial Siemens SENTRON PAC3200 smart power meter. Results show that the Arduino-based smart power meter has similar accuracy to the commercial power meter, making it an interesting alternative for low-budget applications.