Design and implementation of a smart home energy saving system with active loading feature identification and power management

In this paper, a smart home electric energy saving system is implemented by combining smart meter, smart plug, smart mobile devices, and database server. The smart meter consists of a power metering unit, a data storage unit, a meter interface unit and a ZigBee module. The smart plug is composed of a core control unit and a remote monitoring module. User can use smart phone to check and control the operation of appliance, and the power consuming information can be remotely monitored by connecting smart plug to the internet via Wi-Fi media. Besides, the load characteristics in the database server can be employed to identify appliance operation mode by Support Vector Machines (SVM) method, which provides effective message for home electric energy saving application. Finally, a prototype was built up and tested, the test results validate the feasibility of the proposed smart home electricity saving system.