Watt You Pay For is a group project that aims to lower user's energy cost and consumption by monitoring their usage from a user's most easily controlled sources. Our project measures the real energy usage from the outlet, lighting, and heating and cooling. Additionally, to facilitate energy savings, our modules allow users to remotely turn on or off their devices.
In recent years the public has become more and more aware of the effect that power consumption can have. As awareness has increased homeowners are looking for new and meaningful ways to both monitor and control their power consumption. Our Smart Home Energy Management System aims to provide users with a complete system that will both give them control over their consumption in the form of remote on/off control and information in the form of power usage analytics. Our system will be composed of three major components and a web-based interface. The three devices are a smart light switch, smart outlet and A/C control unity. These devices will be monitoring the current consumption of the respective devices hooked up to them, then sending this data over the home's Wi-Fi network. The user will be able to control these devices and see their power consumption statistics via a web-based user interface. The smart light switch will be designed to fit a standard switch box. The device will contain an MCU, Wi-Fi module, and the current sensing components. The power data will then be sent over the Wi-Fi network to the database will it will be processed. These components will require power even when the switch is in the 'off' position so it will be important that our switch box has a connection to the neutral wire. This will allow for a closed circuit even when the light switch is in the 'off' position, allowing the electronics to still be powered. The outlet will be in the form of a power strip, to provide adequate housing for all the components. The outlet will also be composed of an MCU and Wi-Fi module and current sensing components. The power data will be sent over Wi-Fi to the database. To power the electronics in the power strip we must convert the signal from the standard 120V 60Hz to a signal that can the MCU and Wi-Fi module can be powered with. The A/C control unit will also contain an MCU and Wi-Fi module and the current sensing components. However, unlike the other two components the A/C control unit will also have an LCD screen attached to it to display the settings of the A/C unit, as is standard in practice. For this project a smaller current that will be monitored in the A/C unit is smaller than the actual current would be. In our interface we will show both the real power consumption of our model and a more realistic value to demonstrate a more accurate cost and power analysis. Aside from the physical components we will also have a web interface that the user will use to control the devices when connected to the local network and provide information to them on their usage patterns, power consumption and cost. We plan to utilize a cloud-based computing server to process the data and the interface. This will prevent us from needing to create our own server and more accurately reflects how it is done in industry.