Performing Walk-through Energy Audits in Smart Homes

Today, a large number of people use electrical appliances, resulting in an enormous increase in the demand of electricity. Having a limited number of resources to generate electricity, this is everyones keen concern to efficiently use these resources and consequently, conserve the energy. The main idea presented in this papers is to save electricity in homes by controlling the consumption of energy. An Android application have been developed to help the user perform the energy audits, by calculating the consumption of power in Watts. The Smart Home Energy Auditing (SHEA) application facilitates in controlling the home appliances and helps to switch between multiple sources of electricity generation. A hardware system prototype supports the SHEA application. The hardware components have been programmed using Arduino. Whereas, the Smart Home Energy Auditing Android app uses Bluetooth and Wi-Fi for establishing the connection to the system and then switching between different sources of electricity and controlling of home appliances. On Android application user had been provided with different choices, like user can switch between different electricity sources, user can switch load (appliances) to multiple sources of electricity, user can schedule the load shift to multiple sources in peak/non-peak hours, manually and automatically. Moreover, the user has been provided with the option to calculate the monthly bill of electricity used.