Summary

Families spend a large portion of their monthly income on electric energy. At present they have they have no viable way to monitor this expenditure. This project will focus on designing a low cost system that will monitor the electric energy (kilowatt-hours) used in a resident's home to solve this problem. The system will be marketed towards the power companies or a third party company that will resell, install, and update the system. The third party company will be responsible for updating the system as the electric energy rates change. The system will measure the voltage at the load center, as well as the current and power factor on each phase. The system at the load center will then calculate the energy in kilowatt hours as well as the hourly cost depending on the current load. This data will then be sent to a wireless receiver via a Zibgy wireless connection, which will give the consumer an estimate of the current power bill. A accumulated total for the months current power bill will be stored in memory on the device at the load center. As an optional feature for the consumer, this device may be connected to a Windows PC via a serial RS-232 interface to give a graphical analysis of the load usage over time. This software will be designed and implemented in Java.