Centralized smart energy monitoring system for legacy home appliances

Abstract

The increasing global population and reliance on electrical devices for daily life resulted in sharply rising energy consumption. Also, this leads to higher household electricity bills. As a result, there is a growing demand for energy monitoring systems that can accurately estimate energy usage to help save power, especially for older home appliances that are difficult or expensive to update with monitoring sensors. However, current energy monitoring systems have some drawbacks, such as the inability to detect different types of appliances and the deployment complexity. Moreover, such systems are too costly to use in older power infrastructures. To address this issue, we proposed a centralized smart energy monitoring system designed for legacy home appliances, aiming to address the limitations of current energy monitoring systems by avoiding costly infrastructure upgrades to calculate the power consumption of legacy home appliances. The proposed system employs a two-layered architecture comprising hardware (Emontx device, Analog-to-Digital Converters (ADC), and Current Transformer (CT) sensors) and a software layer that includes Artificial Intelligence (AI) predictors using a pre-defined set of rules and K Nearest Neighbours (KNN) algorithms. We conducted three experiments on real home appliances to evaluate the proposed work. The accuracy of the proposed system showed positive results after several modifications and hard tuning of several parameters in devices, specifically for Jordanian power plants.