SEADS: A modifiable platform for real time monitoring of residential appliance energy consumption

Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) is the identification of individual electrical loads from aggregate power measurements. Application of NILM in residential settings has been hampered by limited data availability. Utility billing smart meters provide very sparse (time) sampling of energy use, yielding data that is not adequate for quantifying fundamental harmonics of the waveform. For research in NILM, there is an obvious need for a low-cost sensor system to collect energy data with fast sampling and with significant precision. SEADS (Smart Energy Analytic Disaggregation System) provides a powerful and flexible system, supporting user configuration of sampling rates and amplitude resolution up to 65KHz and up to 24 bits respectively. The SEADS internal processor is capable of implementing NILM algorithms in real time on the sampled measurements.