4 Design and implementation of IoT-enabled smart single-phase energy meter monitoring system

Abstract

Optimal energy usage in smart buildings, smart office, as well as smart homes brings significant impact to the economic growth and sustainability of a country. With the internet of things (IoT) technology, energy management can be performed more effectively through real-time monitoring and control. This book chapter presents a comprehensive design of a low-cost smart single-phase energy meter monitoring system. The architecture of the single-phase energy meter monitoring system comprises the data-capturing device, central processing unit and an IoT platform. The book chapter will be organized in several subtopics. It covers the hardware and software implementation which include the setup, configuration and system integration of the Modbus remote terminal unit (RTU) communication protocol, microcontroller,Wi-Fi integration and IoT platform. A detailed explanation on the configuration of the Modbus communication protocol according to IEEE-754 singleprecision floating-point standard for meter readings will be presented. This information is then sent and stored to IoT platform channel via Wi-Fi connection on an every-minute basis via the user dashboard to show the trends of the electricity information over the time in detail. The operation process flow on the single-phase IEC standard energy meter monitoring system will be described. This book chapter will explain the considerations to be taken in the hardware selection, prototype design and construction to achieve reliability and safety. The results show that an online dashboard via IoT platform was successfully implemented to allow user to monitor their electricity information remotely on a real-time basis. The energy meter prototype is able to read the typical energy such as voltage, current, frequency, active power and power factor from a load every minute. The measurement is successfully uploaded to the cloud database and monitored via the IoT platform. Besides that, the energy information as measured by the prototype showing similar readings is compared to industry-grade, Janitza digital power meter. As a conclusion, the low-cost prototype energy meter is suitable to be used for electricity consumer from residential as well as small-scale business owners to have better understanding on their energy consumption patterns in a day, weeks and months. The system design can be adopted with any device using Modbus RTU protocol to build an IoT smart monitoring system. By using Modbus RTU, subsequently, it can be used for various load profiling analysis to manage and control electricity cost in future.