Domestic power consumption measurement and automatic home appliance detection

There is an increasing concern for the intelligent management of domestic power consumption based on intelligent sensors and actuators (attached to domestic appliances). This paper describes the electronic power meter sensor module of an intelligent management system being developed which is based on a network of functionally independent intelligent sensor and actuator modules. The actuator architecture has different modules to interface and read values from sensors and to communicate with other actuators. The electronic power meter sensor module is responsible for measuring energy and instantaneous and average power. Its functionalities allow it to be used for simple domestic electric power measurement applications. Moreover, it can store power consumption profiles and automatically identify and detect malfunctions of home appliance connected to the network at a given moment. The communication with external devices is implemented using standard serial interfaces.