Design of an electricity consumption measurement system for Non Intrusive Load Monitoring

Non Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) of Home Electrical Appliances (HEAs) has received a major interest in the last twenty years due to the increase of electricity consumption in the residential sector. One NILM key component is the acquistion of voltage and current signals at a high sampling rate, to ease HEAs recognition. In this paper, we discuss the design of a cheap and easy to install current and voltage measurement system based on an Arduino MKR Zero microcontroller. This system allows to monitor the usage of HEAs and thus give to consumers information on their consumption and help them to manage it. The hardware architecture of the proposed system is first described. It includes the current and voltage conditioning circuits. Then, a detail of the software implemented in the microcontroller is given. It consists mainly of an interruption routine that ensures the acquisition regularity and a background task for storing data into a micro SD card. Finally, we show in the last section several individual HEAs power consumption profiles and a whole house power consumption profile obtained using the designed acquisition device.