Smart Load Node for Nonsmart Load Under Smart Grid Paradigm: A New Home Energy Management System

TL;DR

This paper introduces a low-cost, wireless smart load node system for managing non-smart household appliances within smart grids, avoiding infrastructural changes and enabling intelligent home energy management.

Contribution

The paper proposes a universal, cost-effective smart load node that integrates into existing homes without modifications, forming a wireless home area network for load management.

Findings

SLN enables intelligent operation of non-smart appliances.

The system uses Wi-Fi for communication within the home network.

Load management is controlled via a Python-based algorithm.

Abstract

This article presents a novel approach for efficient operation of non-smart household appliances under smart grid environment using the proposed smart load node (SLN). In real world scenario, there are so many non-smart loads currently in use and embedding appliance specific intelligence into them to make them as smart loads will be more expensive compared to the proposed SLN, which is a common solution for all types of non-smart loads. This makes the proposed low-cost SLN, which neither requires any infrastructural change in the electrical wiring of a house nor any constructional change in home appliances at the manufacturing stage and at the consumer end, as a feasible solution for intelligent operation of non-smart home appliances under smart grid environment. The SLNs, which are placed in a home like distributed wireless sensor nodes, form a home area network (HAN). The HAN includes a load management unit (LMU) which acts as master for all distributed SLNs. Wi-Fi is chosen as a medium of communication in the HAN. The LMU incorporates load management algorithm which is written in Python script.