Smart meters have become an important tool not only for households looking to save energy and keep the electricity bill down, but also for utility companies striving to match electricity generation with demand. But while smart meters can provide an overall picture of a household’s electricity usage over time, a team from the University of Sydney’s Faculty of Engineering and Information Technologies is developing a system that aims to monitor the energy usage of individual appliances.
The “MyPower Energy Platform” is built around a smart plug that sits between the wall outlet and the appliance to be monitored. Upon installing the plug, the consumer would input some basic information on their particular appliance on the MyPower website. The smart plug includes an embedded GSM unit so that power usage information it collects about the appliance can then be transmitted via SMS to a cloud-based data warehouse every 30 minutes.
The consumer can then access electricity consumption data and determine the best time to use an individual appliances through the MyPower website. While the MyPower site will be free to access for households that purchase the smart plugs, it is anticipated that utility companies and public agencies would pay to access the information.
By drawing on energy usage data gathered from other consumers, people can also see how their particular appliance compares against others, and just how much money could be saved by upgrading to a new energy-efficient model. But even without investing in new appliances, the team believes the system can provide significant savings by taking advantage of off-peak electricity rates.
“Access to this data will allow users to optimize their appliance usage and take advantage of lower electricity rates by remotely scheduling or switching off the appliance via the smart plug,” says PhD student Mahboobeh Mogaddham, who developed the system along with PhD student Waiho Wong, under the supervision of Professor Joseph Davis. “We are excited because this platform can provide a technically and economically feasible solution for households to reduce their electricity consumption by up to 10 percent – a significant cost reduction over the life of their appliances.”
For those worried that the constant stream of SMS messages from however many smart plugs they decide to place around their home will eat up any potential savings made by the system, Professor Davis anticipates that the system would come bundled with a bulk SMS plan from a mobile provider if and when it becomes commercially available.
Professor Davis believes the system could be used by manufacturers and governments to help encourage the replacement of older, less energy-efficient appliances and to support education and awareness campaigns on cutting energy usage.
The MyPower Energy Platform is currently still at the development stage and is undergoing evaluation on the prospects for commercialization by the University of Sydney. However, it was recently presented the inaugural NASSCOM IT Technical Innovation Award at CeBIT Australia 2012, where judges described it as “an example of practical innovation in taking a number of proven technology components and tackling a pressing issue.”
Source: University of Sydney
The appliance module does exactly the same as the smart plug only it is wireless and reports back to a router where you can view the consumption through a web interface.
There is also a solution for the circuit breaker box. You can do all of that that you are after morriss003. Hope on to the website and if you do not find what you are after talk to me and will explain.
Appliance level data is critical; over 52% of all Australian greenhouse gas emissions attributable to the residential sector arise from appliances.
The SMS costs can be lowered through bulk contracts and will be free to participating households. wi-fi would be better but for patchy coverage.
BTW we too have 240/250 volt supply in India. Using 220 V certified European appliances leads to overheating and higher consumption. I used the basics of electrical engineering to solve the problem. I started off with a 240 V primary to 30 volt /20 amp secondary ISOLATED transformer. Connected the windings as an auto transformer such that I got a 275-245-0 volt autotransformer. Now I connected the input to the 275-0 V taps and took the output from 245-0 v taps. In this configuration with the input being 245 volts I got my output to be app 220 volts. Most of the power was transmitted type and very little was of transformed type. Eliminated overheating altogether, increased the appliance life AND reduced my energy bill.
As far as tracking individual appliances goes, a line noise analyser has the enormous advantage of being able to get data for individual appliances without any hardware changes, and when you add a new appliance, you just plug it in and it's automatically tracked, even if you plug several into the same outlet. It may not be quite as accurate as a real individual meter, but knowing whether your fridge pulls 200 or 205W is far less significant than knowing whether you have a fridge or not.
I would, however, draw your attention to the goals of our project which is briefly stated in my previous post. This is not a solution for individual homes only; it is about building a large data repository of highly disaggregated appliance-level consumption data to enable us to extract and mine actionable knowledge for a range of stakeholders.