A Smart Home Energy Management System using Smart Plugs

The construction and conversion of ordinary homes into “smart homes” has seen a tremendous rise in recent years. This can be attributed to technologies such as the Internet of Things and smart devices that are capable to collecting pertinent information for the purpose of optimizing home energy consumption and cost reduction. Smart homes are considerably expensive. An ordinary home may implement some of the smart technologies without breaking the bank and at the same time, improve their quality of life to some extent. Smart plugs are at the center of enabling an ordinary home into a somewhat smart home because smart plugs are able to provide enough energy consumption information for the development and deployment of systems to manage the energy consumption. The purpose of this paper is to introduce SHEMS, a smart home energy management system that is designed and implemented using off the shelf hardware and software.