2018 4th International Conference on Computing Communication and Automation (ICCCA)
An IoT Based Smart Energy Management System
Jai Krishna Mishra, Shreya Goyal and Vinay Anand Tikkiwal
Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering
Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, Noida, India
official.jaikrishnamishra@gmail.com, shreyasja06@gmail.com and
vinay.anand@jiit.ac.in
Abstract—Physical energy meter reading is an outdated concept,
it is inefficient, prone to errors and leads to a lot of wastage of
manpower and is a burden on the consumers since the energy
companies pass on the cost of physically reading the meters to the
consumers. Smart energy meters solve the above-mentioned
problems to a great extent but replacing the older energy meters
is a very expensive and a humongous task. This paper introduces
an IoT based smart energy meter using the raspberry pi devices
as a solution to the aforementioned issue. A small modification to
the already installed old meters can make them act as prepaid
smart meters. So, the need to replace the old energy meter does
not arise. These meters can be easily accessed through
customized web pages, smart mobile applications and relevant
notifications can be sent to the customers using SMS service.
These meters can be turned ON and OFF automatically once a
user exhausts its prepaid threshold value or through the smart
App. Consumers are notified through SMS when the threshold
set value is about to breach.
Keywords—IoT; wireless sensor and actuator network, smart
meters, smart buildings.
I. INTRODUCTION
In the existing system, electrical meter reading for
electricity usage and billing is done by human workers who
visit homes/buildings to collect this reading [1]. This requires a
large number of workers and working hours to collect the
complete data and generate bills. Billing done in this manner is
prone to reading errors [2]. It can be time-consuming, restricted
and slowed down due to adverse environmental conditions in
which workers may not be able to visit homes. Paper bills can
be easily misplaced while distribution as post-box mailing is
not always reliable [3]. In a country like India with a huge
number of highly dense population (residential housing and
industrial buildings) requires substantial manpower and
working hours to complete the mammoth task of collection
correct meter readings [4]. These eventually increases the
energy provider's operation cost which trickles down to
consumer’s electricity bills being increased [5].
The paper introduces a solution to address the problem
faced by both the consumers and the distribution companies.
This work uses the smart energy meter which utilizes the
features of embedded systems in order to implement the
desired functionalities. The raspberry pi and color sensors
(TCS 3200) are used that counts the total number of LED
blinks situated on electrical meters. This is an add-on to
existing electric meter. A user tracks its electricity uses using a
customized developed webpage or smart App and take actions
as per his preferences.
978-1-5386-6947-1/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE
Arun Kumar
Department of Computer Science & Engineering
National Institute of Technology, Rourkela
Odisha, India, 769008
kumararun@nitrkl.ac.in
The developed system provides information regarding the
individual user's meter readings on a daily/ monthly basis
without any manual intervention [6]. This is achieved through
continuously monitoring and recording the readings of the
energy meter reading in a non-volatile memory. The system
also displays a live meter reading, which can be accessed by
the owner/user on a energy meter webpage through a dedicated
personal account [7]. Also, the system can be used to
discontinue the power supply to a house/building when needed.
II. ARCHITECTURAL MODEL
The device is designed to read the data directly from the
meter with the help of light sensor TCS 3200, which sends the
data to Arduino board. This Arduino then sends this data to
raspberry pi which uploads the data to the ThingSpeak cloud.
The data from ThingSpeak can be accessed using the website
or mobile Application.
Fig. 1. An Architecture of the System.
A complete architecture of the system is shown in Fig. 1.
Various appliances in a household consume energy which an
energy meter reads constantly and this consumed load is
displayed on the meter. A LED blinks continuously on the
meter which counts the energy units consumed. Normally,
3200 blinks are one unit. In the developed system, raspberry pi
3 acts as the main controller, which continuously monitors the
energy meter for unit consumption based on LED blinks
counts. A customized webpage and a Smart App is developed
to monitor the energy consumption and calculate the cost. A
threshold value i.e. customer prepaid amount can be set on
webpage and App with the help of Wi-Fi, as per consumer’s
requirement. When this threshold is about to breach, the system
sends a notification to the consumer. This feedback keeps the
consumers aware of their energy usage. A consumer can
1
choose to recharge or increase the threshold as per their
requirement and willingness to pay. If either is not done, the
electricity supply to the consumer is stopped automatically. A
consumer can visit the webpage anytime and increment the
threshold value. Finally, a monthly bill is generated and sent to
the customer as well as a service provider through a SMS on
the first day of every month.
III. SMART ENERGY METER SYSTEM
The developed Electronic Meter Automation Device
(EMAD) major components include the raspberry pi, Arduino,
Colour Sensor TCS 3200 and a 4 channel relay. These
components are placed in such a compact manner that the
system is easily placed in a meter.
(a) (b)
(c) (d)
Fig. 2. Hardware Components (a) Raspberry Pi, (b) Color Sensor (TCS
3200), (c) Channel Relay, (d) Arduino.
A. Energy Meter
Energy meter or Watt-hour meter is an instrument which is
used to measure the electrical energy consumption of the
consumers. The utility companies are responsible to install
these instruments at places like homes, office buildings,
industries, and organizations to charge them for electricity
consumption by various loads deployed at the sites. Nowadays,
prepaid electricity meters are becoming popular. Smart Energy
Meters or prepaid electricity meters are used to measure the
parameters like produced units, consumed units and to
calculate instantaneous electricity bills.
B. The procedure of Energy Units Calculation
The analog meter readings can be taken down by a human
being which is an old method and these meters are still
installed in most of the houses/buildings. An LED continuously
blinks on these old analog meters depending on the rate of
energy usages. More a consumer uses the electricity, faster it
blinks and vice versa. In the developed system the color sensor
(TCS 3200) is used to count the total number of LED blinks.
These readings are passed to the raspberry pi which uses this
2
data to calculate different parameters like units consumed etc.
After the calculations, these parameters and readings are shown
with the help of an API (ThingSpeak). It shows the measured
parameters in the form of graphs [8]. The same data is used to
visualize on the customized website as well as on smart App.
The smart App has the features to turn ON and OFF the main
supply. This is useful to control the smart meter remotely. The
developed system is an add-on over the existing electric meters
and makes the whole system reliable and smart. The
components of EMAD are described in coming sections.
C. Microcontroller: Raspberry Pi 3
Raspberry pi board is the heart of the developed EMAD
system. It reacts to the 5V supply given by opto-coupler and
keeps on counting the LED blinking. It then calculates the net
recharge available and cost of using the electricity. This data is
continuously stored and displayed on the webpage so that a
user can monitor his/her energy consumption or take actions
according to its preferences. It is also responsible to reacts
when the threshold is breached and sends the SMS to
consumers.
D. Mobile Application
A smart mobile App has been developed for the system.
The App can be used in Android as well as in iOS platform. A
consumer can visualize the data of the EMAD device once
mounted to an electric meter. A user can recharge or cut off the
meter using this smart App. An EMAD device is capable of
handling two-way communication with the grid, i.e. if a
consumers’ house/building is also producing the power using
some renewable energy sources (Solar, Wind etc.), then the
final bill will be calculated based on the power produced and
consumed. It is also possible to introduce the different pricing
scheme which varies with time and the day. As time and
energy information is communicated at regular intervals, the
energy consumption and cost can be regulated.
Fig. 3. Data Visualization Using ThinkSpeak
E. ThingSpeak
The ThingSpeak (API) is an open source Internet of thing
(IoT) Application to store and retrieve data from devices using
the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) protocol over the
Internet or via a Local Area Network (LAN). ThingSpeak
allows for the creation of applications for sensor logging,
location tracking and a social network of things with status
updates. In this work, ThingSpeak API is used to log in the
data and visualize in graphical form as shown in Fig. 3.
F. WIFI Module The remaining prepaid amount, T, can always be calculated as:
In IoT applications, Wi-Fi acts as the heart of it. In this
work, Wi-Fi is used to communicate with the smart App for
changing the threshold value and to ON & OFF the energy
meter. The energy units’ consumption is also communicated
through this and displayed on the webpage. The Consumers are
able to access the raspberry board and meter with help of Wi-
Fi. The pricing details of per units are communicated to
consumers using Wi-Fi in their smart App.
G. Webpage (HTML)
For this work, a webpage, using Hypertext Markup
Language (HTML), has been designed to visualize and operate
energy meter functioning and consumption. Fig. 4. shows a
screenshot of the developed webpage. A Web server has been
set up to store the data and to receive HTML documents for the
Web browser.
Fig. 4. A Snapshot of the Developed Webpage [9].
IV. ENERGY UNITS CALCULATION
Normally, a basic unit of electricity is the Kilowatt hour
(KWh). A 1kWh is 1000 watt for 1 hour. For example, ten 100
watt bulbs used for 1 hour consume 1kWh electricity. In
electrical energy meters, usually, 3200 blinks of the LED
installed on the meters is equivalent of 1 unit of power
consumption. In this work for power consumption, 3200 blinks
are chosen as 1 units as per the meter specification. Let, ȟ
denote the number of blinks of LED,  denotes the number of
units of electricity consumed,  denotes the cost (INR) of per
unit electricity (1 kWh), and  denotes the prepaid amount.
Then the number of units consumed,  can be calculated as:
 7  - Ú
For the practical purpose, in the developed system the
calculations of remaining prepaid amount and energy units are
done on an hourly basis. A notification to the consumer
through an SMS is initiated if a pre-determined threshold value
of the remaining prepaid amount, T is about to be breached.
V. CONCLUSION
This paper has presented an IoT based smart energy
management system. An Electronic Meter Automation Device
(EMAD) has been developed which can be mounted on an old
meter. This device mounting on to the old meters can make
them act as a smart meter. A webpage and smart App has been
developed. The meters can be easily accessed through
customized web pages, smart App and the notification can be
sent using SMS. Meters can be turned ON and OFF
automatically once a user exhausts its prepaid threshold value
or through the smart App. Large-scale data collection is in the
process and in future we plan to deploy few smart meters in
locality apart from the university to see the real household
response of our system.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work has been supported by the Department of
Electronics and Communication Engineering, Jaypee Institute
of Information Technology, Noida. The webpage of the system
can be accessed using www.theemad.tk.
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İ 
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 İ
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Ú=  -   [9] www.theemad.tk.