Smart Home Energy Management System based on the Internet of Things (IoT)

The global increasing demand for energy has brought attention to the need for energy efficiency. Markedly noticeable in developing areas, energy challenges can be at-tributed to the losses in the distribution and transmission sys-tems, and insufficient demand-side energy management. Demand-oriented systems have been widely proposed as feasible solutions. Smart Home Energy Management Systems have been proposed to include smart Internet of Things (IoT)-capable devices in an ecosystem programmed to achieve energy efficiency. However, these systems apply only to already-smart devices and are not appropriate for the many locales where a majority of appliances are not yet IoT-capable. In this paper, we establish the need to pay attention to non-smart appliances, and propose a solution for incorporating such devices into the energy-efficient IoT space. As a solution, we propose Homergy, a smart IoT-based Home Energy Management Solution that is useful for any market –advanced and developing. Homergy consists of the Homergy Box (which is an IoT device with Internet connectivity, an in-built microcontroller and opto-coupled relays), a NoSQL cloud-based database with streaming capabilities, and a secure cross-platform mobile app (Homergy Mobile App). To validate and illustrate the effectiveness of Homergy, the system was deployed and tested in 3 different consumer scenarios: a low-consuming house, a single-user office and a high-consuming house. The results indicated that Homergy produced weekly energy savings of 0.5 kWh for the low-consuming house, 0.35 kWh for the single-user office, and a 13-kWh improvement over existing smart-devices-only systems in the high-consuming house.