Power Line Communication based SmartPlug Prototype for Power Consumption Monitoring in Smart Homes

In order to implement the concepts of smart grid and residential automation, this article presents a SmartPlug prototype for power consumption monitoring in smart homes. It is a device that, when coupled to the sockets, measures electrical voltage and current, and thereafter provides the power consumption to the consumer using the power line communication (PLC) technology. With the knowledge of the consumption, provided by the smart metering, of each outlet, the consumer is able to establish the concept of segmented energy consumption, which is an important allied of energy saving and power demanding. With commercial current and voltage sensors, the SmartPlug was built using the Arduino platform and the end user interface was created using the open source software ScadaBR. After performance evaluation in a laboratory, tests in real electrical plants were performed to validate the prototype, considering bit rates and signal spectrum in the PLC systems.