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Smart home energy management system: An exploration of IoT use cases

Conference Paper · February 2018

DOI: 10.1109/ICASET.2018.8376826

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 Smart Home Energy Management System
An exploration of IoT use cases

Mulham B. Soudan, Homam M. Al Rifaie, Taha M. Asmar and Sohaib Majzoub

Department of Electrical Engineering
University of Sharjah
Sharjah UAE

Abstract— The proposed system design tries to solve the Top and new technologies should be used to ensure that
growing problem of unnecessary energy consumption in an new inventions can benefit us the most. With the growing idea
individual’s household using the concept of the IoT (internet of of the IoT or internet of things, it is only logical that we create
things). The design monitors and analyzes the energy consumed systems that serve the society’s needs using this technology.
by the electricity outlets in the household using sensors and
microcontrollers. The proposed design gives the user multiple
With the help of the internet things hundreds of small tasks
manipulation methods to control energy consumption. The can be done automatically which makes things quicker and
proposed design includes a mobile application which will act as more efficient. Hundreds of examples are there, including our
the communication link between the system and the cloud. On system.
the cloud, a server will make the control of the electrical outlets In this paper, we will talk about the related work of
possible from inside and outside the house. The results varied different scholars. We will explain our proposed design in
depending on the used case. In some cases, it saved up to 50% of detail, this will be followed by the results. After that we will
energy consumption. talk about some constraints and limitations of the system.
Finally, we discus future work on the project.
II. RELATED WORKS
Keywords—energy consumption, IoT, outlets,
sensors,microcontrollers, the cloud, server. In this section, we considered other scholar’s research and
made a small comparison between our designs.
I. INTRODUCTION A. GSM based energy management system
Energy management aims to regulate and monitor the An alternative for our design would be using GSM rather than
energy consumption of an organization, company, or an internet. Skhalkar, Barot, Talele, Sinha, and Jeyakumar in
individual. Home energy management is related to individuals their paper “GSM based Energy Management System”
and households. Smart home energy management introduces describe a design that uses a GSM system as the
advanced and smart technologies to the energy management communication method between the controller part and the
process to make it more efficient for every individual to controlled part of the energy management system. Although
manage their energy consumption that could be caused by GSM communication could be efficient and quick, it could be
human errors in his/her house. These human errors are very
a problem cost-wise. For every interaction the user would
common in almost every house.
have to send an SMS which is calculated as an extra cost to
Some of these errors can lead to serious problems such as
the system. Introducing the internet factor to the system
shorts that can potentially start fires and burn down houses.
Examples of such errors would be forgetting to switch of the removes this extra cost from the formula.[1]
stove. Energy mismanagement can affect a person from B. Ethernet based home energy management system.
several aspects. As mentioned above, safety is a big concern
for every person. With the correct tools for monitoring Another alternative is using wired internet as the
electricity in your house, major incidents can be avoided. communication method between the system’s parts. This
Financially, consuming more energy than necessary inflates design is more expensive duo to the many internet wires that
electricity bills. Month after month will add up to a good will need to be installed. Other than that, installing a wired
amount of money that could be used otherwise in a more connection per electrical outlet or device will cause
pleasant way. Environmentally, Excess energy consumption inconveniences compared to wirelessly connected systems.[2].
eventually leads to air pollution through the extra secretes
released by the power plants.
 III. PROPSED DESIGN volts, we find the power by
In this section, we will explain in details everything in our
system and how it functions. (1)
Then we multiply the result by the period of time in seconds
The proposed design in this paper is as follows: Current that current has been drawn from this outlet
sensors will be connected to the line wire of every electrical (2)
outlet. The sensor raw data will be sent to the microcontroller Which results in the Energy consumed by the outlet.
which will analyze the data and send them to the web host Conversion between units from W/s to kW/hr are left to the
server. From the web host server, the mobile application can user’s preference. The following figure is a flow chart for the
gather the data and display it for the user. At the same time, microcontroller code:
the mobile application will give the user the ability to send the
control commands to the web host server. The microcontroller
is continuously monitoring the variables responsible for
control. When these variables are changed, the microcontroller
will use the data it acquired to perform an action.
A. The monitor and control unit
The monitor and control unit consists of the following: the
microcontroller, the current sensor and the relay. This part of
the system is responsible for collecting real time values of
current being drawn from electrical sockets, performing the
energy calculations and sending them to the webhost server.
Also, it is responsible for receiving control orders and
implementing them.
The microcontroller of choice was the Arduino YUN. We
chose the Arduino YUN for its networking capabilities. This
Arduino board combines two chips on its board. Like other
microcontrollers it has the ATmega32u4 microchip which acts
as the main controller, but it also includes the Atheros A9331
chip which run on Linux. The two chips are connected by a
bridge that can be accessed by the programmer using the
“bridge.open” command. Using a combination of codewords
for these chips, we could achieve the desired results.
We used the ATmega chip mostly for simple calculations.
Lots of more lengthy calculations were done on the mobile
application. This way we split the processing processes which
results in almost optimal execution time. We used the Linux
chip for the networking part of the project. When we needed
to push and pull data from the webhost server we used the
“curl” command.[3] The curl command is used to transfer data
from or to a server, which serves our purpose perfectly. An
example would be "curl
'https://testtestest.firebaseio.com/Appliance1.json' ". This line
of code visits the firebase server name ‘testtestest’, finds the
entity of Appliance1 and reads the information available there.
For the current sensor we used the Allegro ACS712 sensor. Figure 1: Microcontroller flowchart
This sensor can handle up to 30A which is enough for most
common home appliances if not all of them. The working The final component of the monitor and control unit is the
principle of the sensor is the hall effect principle. The hall relay. The relay we used was LEG5-RAYEX. Its coil voltage
effect principle states that when a current carrying conductor is 5V -DC which means the signals from the Arduino
was introduced perpendicular to a magnetic field a voltage microcontrollers are enough to trigger it. The operating circuit
could be measured at right angles to the current path.[3] is AC with 250 V AC rating. Simply, if the microcontroller
After receiving the current sensor values, we calculate receives and order from the user to switch on or off an
energy using the following equations in this order. Since the electrical outlet, it will send a signal on the pin connected to
voltage from the sockets in the United Arab Emirates is 220 that electric outlet’s relay to do the specified action. In the
figure below, a more visual representation of the system is controller to ensure a backup in case any accidents were to
presented. happen. Of course, it gives the ability to cut the electricity
from that outlet. We assigned a value to the ‘On’ state of the
outlet and a value for the ‘Off” state. These values will be
interpreted by the mobile application and sent as commands to
the microcontroller to perform the desired task.
The user can also add a financial limit for an outlet. As
mentioned above the total energy consumed by the outlet is
stored in multiple places. Using the local electricity authority’s
billing constant, the economical equivalent could be
calculated. Once we have this value, it can be monitored and
manipulated like any other variable used in coding the system.
Finally, the user can set a timer for a certain outlet before
the electrical line stops supplying current to that outlet. Using
time related libraries, we take the exact time when the timer
was set. A variable stores the difference between the current
time and the initial time. When the correct time has passed, the
microcontroller will order the relay to switch off that outlet.
The next figure is a snapshot from our mobile application:

Figure 2: System block diagram

B. Webhosting server and mobile application

The second part of the system is the internet interface.
Through the home router, to ensure security, the data will be
sent to the webhost server in the cloud. For the webhosting
server we chose the google firebase. We chose Google
firebase for multiple reasons. First, since Google is one of the
biggest companies in the world, there cybersecurity is one of
the best if not the best on the internet. This ensures that data
about a user’s house stays secure. Secondly, Google firebase
gives the ability to use the ‘JSON’ file format which makes
storing ever-changing current values and issued commands of
several electricity outlets more organized and easier for the
human brain to understand. JSON uses data objects consisting
of an attribute and a value pair. Example: Name:John,
Fridge:ON, TV:OFF.
For the mobile application, we preferred to work with the Figure 3: Mobile phone applications snapshot
Android system for its opensource attribute. Using several
software and SDKs a mobile application can be designed to fit
the user. As a prototype, our mobile application gave the user
the ability to monitor, in real time, energy consumption by
getting instant current values from the sensor and preforming
simple calculations that require minimal execution time from
the microcontroller. This ensures accurate readings with
almost negligible time delay.
The application also allows the user to view the total energy
consumed by an outlet for the current month. This was
implemented by using an accumulative variable, the value of
the variable was saved on the webhost server as well as the
 The next figure is a flowchart for the mobile application: In the next table we will state hypothetical scenarios and
estimate as accurately as possible the possible change in
energy consumption.
Scenario 1 is the one we explained in the previous
paragraph. Scenario 2 could be forgetting an unwanted
appliance on before sleep. A simple glance at the mobile
application from bed would remind you. Scenario 3 could be
forgetting the oven on.

Hypothetical Scenario Energy and assets saved

Scenario 1 50% over the length of the vacation
Scenario 2 Taking into consideration an eight hour
sleep, 8 hours of energy consumption
Scenario 3 Prevent a fire from starting. Assets
saved will vary from 0 to 100%

Table 1 : Possible scenarios and their results

V. CONSTRAINTS AND LIMITATIONS

For the system to function as promised, some constraints and
limitations should be taken into perspective. Since the system
works over the internet, internet connectivity should be
available at both ends of the system for it to work. If one of
the ends is not connected to the cloud, it will neither be able to
read the values it needs nor write to the webhosting server.
The controller needs to be connected to a power supply all the
time for the system to work. If the controller is removed from
Figure 4: Mobile phone applications flowchart the picture, then the system will collapse. Finally, strength and
speed of the internet connection on either end could result in a
IV. RESULTS certain delay when both reading and writing to the server. The
delay could mount up to 20 seconds. As long as the system is
In this section we will discuss the results of our design. not installed in a time critical environment, this delay will not
We have implemented a system to give the user a more have any troublesome effect.
comprehensive control over his energy consumption. The
scenario we theoretically tested is the following: The United
Arab Emirates hosts a very large number of expatriates. VI. FUTURE WORK
Usually, in the summer, these people tend to leave the country In this section we will talk about our future plans for the
on vacation. Since the weather gets very hot and humid in the system and ways to expand its scope.
summer, air conditioners are needed to keep the furniture Unfortunately, since the system design was meant as a
intact. Keeping the air conditioners on for 24 hours a day for
graduation project, we were limited on time to perfect the
the length of the vacation is not needed and will result in an
system. With the current design, the readings and calculations
inflation in all aspects that energy management tries to
for resistive loads will be perfect while using other types of
control. In our prototype, we replaced an air conditioner with a
simple light bulb and used our system to alternate the state of loads have to be compensated through calculations because of
the outlet every one hour. This ensures that the furniture will the power factor. Ongoing work on the project includes the
stay safe and at the same time reduce by 50% all negative design of a voltage sensor that will be connected in parallel to
outputs of energy consumption. Other use cases include the electrical line. Instantaneous values will be taken from
parents benefitting from the timer feature in the system, both the current sensor and the voltage sensor and multiplied
electricians noticing errors or failures that could lead them to to give exact readings for all types of loads. Another future
the source of errors, and many more. goal is to expand the system so it can handle bigger entities
such as factories, office buildings, and apartment blocks. If the
industrial sector, for example, takes more care in its energy
management, air pollution levels will decrease dramatically
which helps protect the environment for the next generations.
Faults in machinery that could cause huge hazards could be Embedded Software and Systems Symposia, 2008,
doi:10.1109/icess.symposia.2008.43.
detected earlier through unexpected current and energy [3] Pillai , Sarath. “CURL Command Tutorial in Linux with Example
readings which insures safety for both the employees and the Usage.” Slashroot.in, 16 Mar. 2014, 13:45, www.slashroot.in/curl-
factory itself. Offices could save hundreds of dollars’ worth of command-tutorial-linux-example-usage.
[4] “What Is the Hall Effect?” Melexis, www.melexis.com/en/articles/hall-
electricity yearly through proper energy management.
effect.
[5] Kumar, Shiu. “Ubiquitous Smart Home System Using Android
Application.” International Journal of Computer Networks &
Communications, vol. 6, Jan. 2014, pp. 33–42.,
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