This paper presents a practical design of wireless sensor
network based energy monitoring smart home system. Several
Low cost Smart Power Outlets (LSPOs) have been designed,
each integrated with WSN node and electric meter and the cost
of each individual sensor platforms is less than 60 USD per
unit. The system can help consumers to increase the efficiency
of electric utility by shifting their non-urgent appliances to the
Off-Peak hours; turning off appliances during non-using time
to reduce electricity expenses. Real time power consumption
data of home area systems can be accessed by energy provider.
The advantage of our system is low cost design by using miniweb server and low cost transceiver modules. This criterion
can make the idea of home smart grid achievable; every energy
consumer can own an energy monitoring smart home system
with affordable cost. They can perform both the smart home
controlling and energy monitoring function on this system.
Our initial work bases the way for further study into
implementation WSNs for residential area smart grid. As a
future work, we are planning to apply optimization-based
techniques into real system for improving the energy efficiency
for home appliances.