Wireless smart meter measures how much power you use

Hal Hodson, technology reporter

(Image: Image Source/Rex Features)

Smart appliances are the ugly ducklings of home technology. No one is really sure why you'd want to use Evernote on your fridge?or start your washing machine over the internet.

As a concept, smart devices do have the potential to help save money, despite their ludicrous price tags, by measuring the amount of electricity you use and helping you reduce it. But forget the $4000 smart fridge - engineers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, have designed a cheap wireless device that can monitor the power consumption of your appliances with 98 per cent accuracy, and it doesn't even need plugging in.

Built by Niranjini Rajagopal and colleagues and presented to the International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, this week, the device uses electromagnetic waves to monitor the electric current flowing through the wires that plug your appliances into the wall. You don't even need to pull the dishwasher out from the wall to install the meter, which runs for years on two AA batteries. Plug-in electricity monitors do exist, but they can be tricky to install on large appliances, and are rated up to a maximum power per appliance. Rajagopal's system doesn't have these drawbacks.

Every time an appliance changes the amount of power it is using by turning on or off, the sensors pick up the corresponding fluctuations in the electromagnetic field around the wire that supplies the electricity. The sensors use a wireless network to send this switching information back to a central power-monitoring system for the whole house, which can measure the increase in power use and link it to the appliance that tripped the EMF sensor.

To test the system, Rajagopal installed it in a family home and ran it for a week, monitoring an LCD TV, washing machine, toaster oven, air-conditioning unit, laser printer, refrigerator and iron with the EMF sensors. The set-up was compared with results from plug-in meters and was found to measure the total power to 98 per cent accuracy. It did better with heavy power-use appliances like fridges than with small, intermittent devices like the laser printer. The work was partly funded by Samsung Electronics, the company behind the smart fridge.

Source: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/2a78f010/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Cblogs0Conepercent0C20A130C0A40Cwireless0Esmart0Emeter0Bhtml0Dcmpid0FRSS0QNSNS0Q20A120EGLOBAL0Qonline0Enews/story01.htm

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