Remote energy monitoring and profiling system

Abstract

Traditional meter reading for electricity consumption and billing is done by human operators from house to house and building to building. This requires huge number of labor operators and long working hours to achieve complete area data reading and billing. Human operator billing is prone to reading error as sometimes the houses electric power meter is placed in a location where it is not easily accessible. Labor billing job is sometimes also restricted and slowed down by bad weather conditions. The increased development of residential housing and commercial building in a developing country, such as Pakistan, requires more human operators and longer working hours to complete the meter reading task. In order to achieve efficient meter reading, reduce billing error and operation costs, Automatic Meter Reading (AMR) system plays an important role to address the above mentioned problems. AMR is an effective means of data collection that allows substantial saving through the reduction of meter re-read, greater accuracy, allows frequent reading, improved billing and customer service, more timely energy profiles and consumption trends updates, and better deployment of human resource. In this project, GSM technology will be used to implement an AMR system. The GSM Energy Profiling System (GEPS) takes advantage of the available GSM infrastructure’s nationwide coverage and the Short Messaging Service (SMS) to transmit energy reading, from the digital electric meters, to the supplier (server) and receive alerts at the consumer (User) end. An interface has been developed at the server end to receive the readings transmitted by the consumers and update the records in the billing/consumption database. The data collected is also uploaded to the web server and illustrative energy consumption profiles of all users are maintained. An additional feature explored is the Global Positioning System (GPS) to indicate the location of consumers (traffic profile). This would be beneficial if used in collaboration with sensor circuits to indicate meter theft. If commercially employed, this is a comprehensive system which accurately maintains and illustrates energy usage data via an efficient monitoring and profiling system. The system also has the flexibility to include extensive control by the supplier company.