Creating Greener Homes with IP-based Wireless AC Energy Monitors

A home where every major appliance can be monitored for energy consumption and individually controlled wirelessly has long been a dream of gadgeteers and the green-conscious alike. Research has shown that real-time, per-appliance electricity usage feedback can induce behavior changes that lead to 10% to 20% reduction in usage [2].

We present ACME: an IP-based wireless device that provides real time energy usage measurement and control for AC devices. This device fills the gap between inexpensive watt-meters and expensive networked enterprise energy monitors. We show that ACME provides accurate measurement of active, reactive, and apparent energy from milli-amps to tens of amps. We also demonstrate its ability to remotely switch the connected appliance.

In this demo, we will present a complete home monitoring system that integrates a set of ACMEs with an 802.15.4-to-802.11 router and a web server. Energy measurements will be pushed directly into a database by the ACMEs via UDP and retrieved by the web server continuously or on-demand to generate real-time graphs.