Internet of Things (IoT) based Energy Tracking and Bill Estimation System

Electricity is the most requisite energy in modern times. IoT based energy tracking and bill estimation system discussed in this paper has an objective to build awareness among household and industrial consumers about their usage of this energy. It does so by displaying real-time estimated electricity consumption by each load connected to it and realtime estimated bill of total consumption on a monitor unit. The novel approach used in the proposed system is the integration of a cloud-hosted database and control unit. The hosted database in Google Firebase enabled the simple design of this system, which is without the use of any electric energy measurement chip or current and voltage sensor, and it also gets logged with the final estimated bill of each month. To save energy when unused, users can operate the control unit to transmit switching instructions for loads. The proposed system also uses NodeMCU, 4-channel relay module, and Blynk android application. NodeMCU fetches average consumption detail of loads from and logs estimated bill to the cloud-hosted database, monitors the duration for which each relay in a 4-channel relay module was switched-on, performs calculations, and transmits real-time results to an IoT cloud interface. 4-channel relay module executes switching instructions on loads sent over the internet via the control unit, and the Blynk android application is the IoT cloud interface with both control unit and monitor unit built-in. This paper provides highlights on cloud-hosted database details, hardware design, IoT cloud interface application design, and working principle with mathematical modeling of the proposed system and tested results of this system are discussed, with the cloud-hosted database and IoT cloud interface.