An innovative cost-effective smart meter with embedded non intrusive load monitoring

Most of the time, domestic energy usage is invisible to the users. Households have only a vague idea about the amount of energy they are using for different purposes during the day, and the electric bill is usually the only monthly/bimonthly feedback. Making the energy consumption promptly visible can make the difference and foster a really efficient usage of the energy in a city. The emerging smart metering infrastructure has the potential to address some of these goals, by providing both households and electric utilities useful information about energy consumption, with a detailed breakdown to single appliance contribution. This paper presents a novel ultra-low-cost smart metering system capable of providing domestic AC load identification, by implementing both basic/typical smart meter measurement and a simple yet effective load disaggregation algorithm, which can detect and monitor domestic loads starting from a single point of measurement.