Automatic sequential reactive power compensation and harmonic suppression at loads using appliance clustering and power quality monitoring

Abstract

We have home brewed a perfect recipe for Arduino automated home utility monitoring and correction system. In this paper, we propose a smart system that could easily be built using off-the-shelf modules and could be programmed to fulfill utility power quality requirements using existing smart utility meters and non-intrusive appliance monitoring and correction system. We have included the hardware design, software, wireless topology system used, experiment results and implemented real hardware load modeling. Our utility monitoring and correction system can be used for detecting energy expenditure breakdown per appliance, detecting power hungry faulty appliance, solving the power quality problem at the root and recognition of occupant activity. The system also able to correct each appliances power factor and suppress its harmonics, resulting in more efficiently reducing of electricity bill of building owners.