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Power Monitoring: Remote Data Capture and Analysis

Sample Prepaid Energy Meter
source: Awoyemi Awoyokun

I live in one of those estates where there are shared facilities like street lights, water treatment plant but not 24 hours electricity.

I walked from my house to the gate and heard the Estate generator switched on though there was public supply as at when I left home. Upon enquiry, I found out that the credit on the prepaid electricity meter for the Estate Shared Service Meter was used up. As such, the maintenance officer on duty switched on generator to power streetlights and pump water.

How could this have happened? Shouldn't the maintenance office have known that the credit was almost depleted? Shouldn't.....  I ranted for about 5 minutes. Before I came back to ask: how could IoT have prevented this from happening?

These are the questions:
  1. Could IoT have been used know that the prepaid credit was almost exhausted?
  2. Could a system have analysed the average rate of electricity consumption, determined how many days to exhausting the credit and firing someone emails/notifications that the credit was about to finish?
  3. I heard that management did not approve "too much" credit because they did not trust the use of the credit. Can management get a report which shows daily weekly PHCN usage?
  4. Can management get a report which shows daily/weekly/monthly Generator usage? 
  5. Was generator being used at a time when there was public power?
  6. You live in a serviced apartment, you are billed for use of diesel generator for a period that seems ridiculous? Can you get an automated report of when and for how long PHCN/Generator was used? Maybe even log on to a web portal to see the details
Raspberry Pi 3
source: www.raspberrypi-spy.co.uk

 IoT Solution
Raspberry Pi Zero
source: www.raspberrypi.org
  1. A Raspberry pi (or Pi Zero) with a camera connected with a "selfie stick" about 5 cm from the face of the Electricity prepaid meter. I use Python to capture the image of the meter reading every 60 seconds and an OCR software like Tesseract to convert it to text and write it to a MySQL database.
  2. Once you have meter reading in text every minute time/date stamped, then analysis to get information like average daily/weekly/monthly rate of usage can be obtained by processing of stored data.
  3. Use Python to send custom reports by email using SMTP. 
  4. I explained how the Raspberry Pi can can get information about whether it is on generator or PHCN by sampling the voltages from each source, converting to 3.3v DC and feeding it into the RPi - details is available in my previous post: https://ubiquitousiot.blogspot.com/2017/12/remote-power-management-iot-for-street.html
  5. The details of power availability from the different sources can be saved to the MySQL database. 
  6. A PHP/Java script application can be used to analyse and present the data in a web application for users to view power information.
Imagine it, we build it. IoT makes remote monitoring and administration possible.

Do share your own IoT ideas in the comments section.










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