Design and Implementation of Multi Facility Power Postpaid Meter with Bluetooth Control

Welcome to the world of Nigerian electrical utilities, where we have the centralized metering infrastructure (CIM), which is either at the distribution poles or at the consumer premise, allowing easy billing. Nevertheless, aggregation energy usage in communal residential organizations with several households is difficult to be manually allocated, triggering disputes when occupants refuse to pay according to their allocated portion. To ameliorate this inefficiency, this study proposes and prototypes a multi-node (five-node) smart metering system featuring Bluetooth-enabled control. The approach focused on the creation of an embedded system architecture, integrating ambient sensors and a microcontroller to automatically measure and estimate household consumption at the individual level. Cost allocation, based on power consumption data from each node was automatically processed using computer algorithms, eliminating the need for human intervention. The real-time data and user interaction were done through a mobile application that used Bluetooth communication module. The postimplementation evaluation confirmed the effectiveness of the system in automating the equitable billing mechanism and distributing it across five households in the compound, so that trust and accountability are ensured in the process. This prototype reveals the potential for hybridizing decentralized metering technologies with networks of wireless Internet of Things (IoT), to facilitate energy management in multi-tenant settings, reduce charges disputes between consumers and suppliers due to inaccurate meters, and improve operational efficiency in utilities.