Development of a Low Cost Device for Monitoring Energy Consumption Profile in Rural Consumers

This work shows a proposal for development of a device for smart home energy monitoring, applied in rural areas where the user rarely has a very good signal for transmission data in the internet. These homes are frequently located a far distance from urban centers and therefore has no stable Internet networks, being a hard location for IoT development. In order to apply a robust and low-cost monitoring system, we developed a radio network system scalable for 125 points. The system is composed by measuring nodes, which can be plugged to the electronic home devices and electric rural machines. The central node receives and stores data from peripheral nodes, starting the first Brazilian rural area load database and showing the user his consumption in real time. The motivation for this work is to make this device a real and cheap equipment for users around the world, with no restrictions of area, also providing a top view of all energy consumption. Actually, this device is being used for two rural residences.