DESIGN AND DEVELOMENT OF A POWER METER TO OPTMIZE POWER USAGE

The practice of measuring electrical power is made by meters or counters, which are used to calculate the amount of energy supplied, and a company charges its users. Currently, the devices used are provided by the utility company [3]. These devices are large, expensive, and require trained personnel for installation, so it only has a meter device that only allows the user to have the global consumption. Likewise, the company will only report monthly consumption, which does not allow to determine what device is demanding more power and when this happens. Today, advances in electronic devices enable us to manufacture cheaper meter with similar features with an acceptable error in the measure. This allows the users to have more than one meter at home. We can have a meter per circuit, even a device per appliance. In this way, we can have a better perception of consumption at the time it is happening. Therefore, this project will design an Electric Power Meter, a device that allows us to measure the energy consumption per electrical circuit even for each device at home. Detailed knowledge of the consumption of each device will allow us to identify which devices are those that increase the cost of our bill. Likewise, our device will help to identify when one of them is not working properly. In this prototype, we use a co-design methodology hardware-software. Our design is based on open platforms both hardware and software preliminary results show that our meter can monitor a three-phase load or single-phase load with an average error of less than 5% when it estimates the instantaneous power.