Accuracy comparison of low-cost energy meters for home electrical consumption assessment

Plugging the different home appliances onto Low-cost Energy Meters (LCEMs) allows the estimation of their electrical consumption and also the estimation of the whole-house consumption by summing up the individual consumption of each appliance. In this paper, we compare the power (energy) consumption given by some LCEMs with respect to the true consumed power (energy). We also discuss the choice of the ground truth reference for the comparison. The results show that for power measurements, the LCEMs performed accordingly to the proclaimed relative uncertainty (less than 2 percent) for resistive loads with high power levels (more than 100 W) but did not do well for low power levels. Also, for non resistive loads, the LCEMs performed differently. Energy measurements show that an accurate power measurement does not necessarily condition the accuracy of the energy measurement of the LCEMs which is rather surprising.