Energy Consumption Monitoring System (kWh) and Load Control Through Messaging Applications

Abstract

In the city of Barranquilla (Colombia), the company that provides residential energy services uses analog meters to mea- sure energy consumption. These meters are not user friendly and keeping track of energy consumption based on their reading is a tedious task. In addition, it is not generally known how this energy consumption is calculated in money, especially considering that the calculation changes depending on the socioeconomic status of the user. For this reason, most users do not know how much they have consumed, nor the economic cost of the service, until they receive the bill. There are solutions that use the IoT and that offer the user a more accessible and easy way to keep track of energy consumption, but they do not offer an ac- curate representation of the monetary value of energy consumption, since they do not take into account the Colombian con- text. In this work, a solution that takes this into account is expo- sed. The PZEM-004T multiparameter meter and the PZCT-02 current sensor were used to measure energy consumption in a home. These are connected to a microcontroller with a Wi-Fi module, the NodeMCU ESP8266, which communicates with a Telegram application messaging bot for data visualization and user interaction. Through the messaging bot of the Telegram application, the user can set alarms, check in real time the estimate of their energy consumption and its monetary value, make adjustments to the parameters used to calculate the energy value, as well as exercise control of some of the loads that demand more power in the home. The result obtained by the developed system deviated by -1.37% with respect to the energy service provider’s bill.