Online energy monitoring system

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Nowadays reducing the energy consumption is fundamental either for environmental (climate change) or economic reasons. Monitoring energy is the first step to achieve this objective. With all the technology that we have at our reach, it is really disappointing that there is not a product at every house to monitor the energy we use. A fairly recent study by CenterPoint Energy Inc. and the Department of Energy [1] found that 71% of customers reported changing their energy consumption as a result of having access to energy data in their homes. Another energy-saving campaign [2] conducted in Sabadell, Spain, reported savings of the 14.3% in the bill. Thus, it can be deduced that it is something that clearly helps the user. The main object of this project is designing a system capable of measuring the power consumed by a device and send the data over the internet, plotting it in a friendly graph that everyone can understand. Uploading it to the Internet is an easy way to catalogue the energy consumption since the first moment you start measuring it. At the same time information can be accessed from any fix or mobile browser instead of depending on a specific one. The main hardware used for this project was the Arduino Ethernet, responsible for collecting the power data. As for the software, MySQL database was used for data logging the energy consumption, PHP language was needed to send the data collected from the Arduino board to the local web server that was implemented with Apache software and JavaScript was used to design the friendly graphs. The methodology followed in this project could be divided in three steps. First, design a sensing system and program the code to capture the current and voltage with the Arduino micro-processor. Second, implementing a method to send the data collected to an online database. And finally and only if this was completely achieved, go further and design a script to graph this data. Everything would be independent for third-party websites. Managing your own website gives more freedom as the project does not depend in other applications that may be outdated in a future. The principal aim of the project of plotting a graph of the energy consumption over the internet was successfully achieved. Besides, the sensing circuits for the current and the voltage were theoretically designed and simulated.