Real time monitoring of AMR enabled energy meter for AMI in Smart City - An IoT Application

Smart meters are promising towards increase in energy efficiency, but their installation needs significant infrastructure change, ranging from installation of new hardware units at individual households - a time consuming task, to creation of data servers to store the data available from these smart meters. The cost and time issue involved in this task has motivated us to devise a cost effective and portable hardware, capable of adding functionality of smart meters into traditional meters. This paper describes the method for measuring active power registered by traditional meters in real time. Considering the worst case as, cases when traditional meter registers less than 10 watt, the proposed system can provide its users with active power consumption data in 101.25 seconds as against monthly billing cycle of traditional meters. The proposed system uses LDR for sensing the frequency of LED present on the meter, which blinks at a frequency proportional to the active power registered by traditional meters. It also uses ESP8266-12e to compute the active power of load connected across traditional meter, from sensed value of blinking frequency of LED and store it in an online data server.