Design of a low-cost, high-resolution retrofit module for residential natural gas meters

There has been considerable interest in recent years in deploying smart meters in residential homes capable of distinguishing appliance-specific usage from whole-house consumption. Smart meters used in conjunction with algorithms that analyze usage data and other appliance attributes have been found to be a cost-effective and scalable approach. Based on this idea, the authors recently reported a laboratory-based solution for natural gas consisting of an encoder module retrofitted onto an existing residential gas meter. In this work, a detailed analysis of real gas consumption rates and patterns from common household appliances is performed and used to simulate the metering performance of a meter equipped with such an encoder module. The simulation is used to establish the optimal encoder resolution for a prototype encoder design that balances cost with performance. Improvements to the algorithms presented in the previous study to analyze the time-resolved data by deducing which appliance is using natural gas are also presented. The design, fabrication, and testing of a prototype encoder module is also presented. •A low-cost, high-resolution mechanical encoder for natural gas meters is developed.•A model of the meter and encoder is used to find the optimal encoder resolution.•90 pulses per revolution was found to be the optimal encoder resolution.•An adaptive averaging scheme is used to improve the meter reading algorithm.•A self-teaching capability is developed for initial system setup.