A non-intrusive identification of home appliances using active power and harmonic current

In recent years, research on non-intrusive load monitoring has become very popular since it allows customers to better manage their energy use and reduce electrical consumption. The traditional non-intrusive load monitoring method, which uses active and reactive power as signatures, has poor performance in detecting small non-linear loads. This drawback has become more prominent because the use of nonlinear appliances has increased continuously during the last decades. To address this problem, we propose a NILM method that utilizes harmonic current in combination with the changes of real power. The advantages of the proposed method with respect to the existing frequency analysis based NILM methods are lower computational complexity and the use of only one feature to characterize the harmonic content of the current.