REAL-TIME POWER MEASUREMENTS IN SMART BUILDING MONITORING SYSTEM

Abstract

The concept of a smart building or a home automation system is often characterized by the ability to control and monitor various household appliances to provide improved convenience, energy efficiency and security. In this paper a smart building real-time power monitoring system is proposed. The system targeted at enhanced safety and user awareness about power consumption with reduced cost. The consumed power can be instantaneously measured. The system can be programmed such in the case increasing power consumption, and start to turn off some insignificant appliances. Consequently, power consumption is reduced down and the cost is reduced. The general-purpose microcontroller (Arduino) available in market with low price. An interpolation technique is proposed to reduce the time of data acquisition. The experimental power load measurements achieved by proposed system are compared in the Lab with the precision and commercial power meters. The comparison shows good results, and the typical time required to measure the real power load and power factor is 42.8 ms for one cycle measurement with 192 samples of data acquisition. The maximum error in measurements are 6% W for real power and 4% for PF.