Development of Home Energy Monitoring and Prediction System with Load Management Using IoT Technology

In recent years, prepaid billing seems to be the most common billing scheme for low-income households as it allows consumers to have more control over their energy usage. However, consumers still have to manually check their available electricity balance from the meter which is quite a challenge especially when they are away hence they sometimes find themselves running out electricity due to failure to access the status of their available energy units in real-time. Thus, this paper presents the development of a home energy monitoring and prediction system with load management. It aims to enable to consumers to make conscious decisions about their energy usage as per the remaining electricity balance for better energy monitoring and load management since enhancing energy usage efficiency is now more urgent and critical than ever before due to the current demand-supply deficit. It utilizes the power of IoI’, ESP32 micro controller, Firebase, and Android app development to allow consumers to remotely monitor and control their energy usage and their household appliances in real-time while at the same time presenting home owners with the status of their available energy balance and how long that available electricity can last before being depleted based on their consumption rate. The experiment was carried out under different load conditions with the appliances being controlled from the app and the results were updated in real-time on the developed app. The obtained results demonstrate that the system allows the home owner to access and visualize his/her available energy units at any given time in real-time from anywhere and further allows consumers to visualize their energy consumption trends.