Improved Smart Power Socket for Monitoring and Controlling Electrical Home Appliances

The recent increase in electricity tariff and the introduction of feed-in tariff from renewable resources have increased the interest of energy consumers, such as those in commercial and residential buildings, in reducing their energy usage. This paper proposes a smart power socket and central control system that utilizes the Zigbee communication protocol to control energy usage. The system is designed such that smart sockets wirelessly provide the necessary data to a central controller. Then, the system analyzes the data to generate control commands to turn the devices attached to the smart socket ON or OFF. Experimental results show that the proposed smart socket can correctly read the power consumption of wirelessly connected devices from up to 18 m away without loss of data. The central controller can effectively control multiple sockets on the basis of a scheduled user program code. A 24-min implementation of the proposed energy management algorithm shows a reduction of 0.811 kWmin (0.0134 kWh) in energy usage after the use of the smart sockets as load controllers. Thus, the proposed smart socket system can be fully utilized in a home energy management system with a proper scheduling algorithm.