What is Load Monitoring?
Load monitoring and identification is a method of determining the operation and electrical energy consumption of individual appliances based on the analysis of composite load measured from the main supply in a building. It can supply information such as type of load, electricity consumption detail, and the running conditions of the appliances to both the consumer side and the utility side. The information can be used to formulate load plan strategies for optimal energy utilization and helps to reduce energy usage.
Load monitoring techniques can generally be grouped into intrusive and non-intrusive load monitoring. Intrusive load monitoring provides accurate results and would allow each individual appliance's energy consumption to be communicated to a central hub. However, this method is costly because of the number of equipment to be manufactured and installed. Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) also known as energy disaggregation is cost-effective and convenient means of load monitoring since it requires lower equipment due to fewer components to install and smaller space requirements.
Why Load Monitoring is Important?
Around 25% of global greenhouse gas emissions come from the burning of coal, natural gas, and oil for electricity and heat generation. It is the largest single source of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Appliance Load Monitoring (ALM) is very important for consumption and energy savings monitoring. Appliance monitoring information leads to the reduction of energy consumption. Furthermore, knowledge of the exact time an appliance is used can be employed in an energy-consumption optimization system. Such systems could provide recommendations to households for potential savings, by deferring appliance use to a day period when electricity is either cheaper or has a lower carbon footprint. Disaggregated data may also help to identify malfunctioning or inefficient equipment and also provides valuable information to facilitate power system planning, load forecasting, new types of billing procedures, and ultimately reduce energy consumption. Reduction of energy consumption means a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.
Why Non-Intrusive Monitoring?
The Intrusive load monitoring system is a metering system that measures the energy consumption of an appliance by connecting power meters to each appliance in the household. Therefore, it requires entering the house, thus the system is referred to as intrusive. The intrusive load monitoring system is a comprehensive, systematic, and convenient method of monitoring load. However, the cost of installation and maintenance of measuring devices such as meters or sensors may be too expensive. To adequately monitor appliances, sensors are installed at each appliance to be monitored, and once the appliance recorder receives a sensor message, it immediately records the load data and delivers them to the data center for further analyses. In addition, the intrusive load monitoring technique is too complicated to implement in an ordinary household without a two-way communication device such as a smart meter.
Non-intrusive load monitoring is a convenient means of determining the energy consumption and the state of operation of individual appliances based on analysis of the aggregate load measured by the main power meter in a building. NILM is a process of analyzing changes in the voltage and current going into a building and deducing what appliances are used in the building as well as their individual energy consumption. It is called non-intrusive because it does not require intruding into the house or consumer premises when measuring the power consumption of different appliances. Smart meters with NILM technology are used by utility companies to survey the specific uses of electric power in different homes. NILM is considered a low-cost alternative to intrusive monitoring techniques. The idea of analyzing the power flow to determine household appliances and report on their operating condition started when George W. Hart was collecting and analyzing load data as part of a residential photo-voltaic system studied (Ehrhardt-Martinez, 2010). The basic monitoring principle is to recognize a step-change in active and reactive power in the total load produced by altering the operating state of the different customer’s appliances.
How NILM Works?
A NILM is designed to monitor an electrical circuit that contains a number of devices (appliances) that switch on and off independently. By a sophisticated analysis of the current and voltage waveforms of the total load, the NILM estimates the number and nature of the individual loads, their individual energy consumption, and other relevant statistics such as time-of-day variations. No access to the individual components is necessary for installing sensors or making measurements. This can provide a very convenient and effective method of gathering load data compared to traditional means of placing sensors on each of the individual components of the load. Traditional load research instrumentation involves complex data-gathering hardware but simple software. The NILM approach is the opposite of this, with simple hardware but complex software for signal processing and analysis. Only a single point in the circuit is instrumented, but mathematical algorithms must separate the measured load into separate components. NILM has been performed through machine learning and due to the advancement of machine learning, TinyML, and electronics, NILM energy disaggregation can now be performed very easily and accurately even using a cheap microcontroller.
My Project Plan
For developing my non-intrusive load monitoring device I will follow the following steps:
- Setting up the developing environment (I will use ModusToolbox & Windows 10) and testing the hello world program.
- Connecting the sensors and writing code for interfacing with the sensors.
- Developing firmware for collecting data for different household appliances.
- Developing ML model for detecting appliance
- Developing final firmware using ML model and sending data to Cloud using MQTT.
- Finalizing the project
- 3D Encloser Design