Prototype of Postpaid Electricity and Water Usage Monitoring System

Abstract

This paper presents a prototype design and implementation of home users' postpaid electricity and water usage monitoring system. The system design is consisted of four main components such as Arduino UNO microcontroller and Bluetooth module, current and water flow sensors, RGB LED, and alarm buzzer. Current and water flow sensors will measure the current and water flow driven in installation. Measurement data will be sent to Arduino UNO as microcontroller. Arduino microcontroller will be reading and processing the data. If the current and water usage exceeds the predetermined limits, then microcontroller through Bluetooth module will trigger the RGB LED to light up and then buzzer will sound as a warning to notify users. Three different situations have been applied to test the device performance. The first two is for each electricity and water usage limits. And the third is when both utilities are combined simultaneously. Testing results show that for the first two, acceptable limits of electricity and water usage are at highest points (900 W and 3 L). But, for the third is varied according to the combination between electricity and water usage limits. These results showed that the prototype can be used as an energy monitoring system to warn and notify home users from monthly overdue consumption fees of postpaid electricity and water usage. But, this prototype still needs much improvements to be ready applied as a commercial device.