Home Energy Management and Monitoring Using Ubidots Platform

Abstract

This paper introduces a practical design for home energy management and monitoring. It has been assumed that the
home has a 12 VDC power source and with variable generation power. The virtual house has loads that consisting of four lamps,
each with a power of 10 watts and operated on 12VDC. The home can be operated in two modes. The first mode is the grid-tied
mode, in which the energy is imported or exported the power to/from the grid depending on whether the home source generation
power is greater than or less than its load. The second mode is called the island mode, in which the home depends on its power
supply to feed its loads with the required power. The transition between the two operating modes of the home is controlled fully
by the Arduino UNO microcontroller according to the main grid status and home status (generation and load demand). The
assumption that was set in the designed system is that the maximum current that a home source can supply is 3A. Therefore,
when the current that a home needs is more than this value, it imports energy from the main grid and less than that value, it
exports energy to the grid. The data of the grid voltage and load current of the home were transferred by the Arduino UNO
microcontroller to the Node MCU using RF (HC-12) module. The cases of the main grid and the home power source are
monitored in real-time using the Ubidots platform. These cases data raised to the Ubidots platform by using the Wi-Fi- ESP8266
included in the Node MCU board. All cases were tested in practice and the Ubidots platform showed a quick response in
updating the data as well as its security.