In the context of the ongoing global warming, with environmental concerns regarding the greenhouse gas emissions due to our increasing energy consumption, smart energy management solutions have gained popularity as they have the potential to reduce our impact on the environment and also on our budgets. This paper proposes one of the most affordable designs for an autonomous, microcontroller-based demand-side energy management system to be installed in a home environment where it reduces the standby power consumed by the controlled devices. As a secondary function, it monitors and controls the lights to further save energy. The proposed system is designed to operate independently and also to limit the new wireless sources of electro-magnetic radiation introduced in the home environment. Six homes have been analyzed in terms of the measured energy consumption and to evaluate the energy management capabilities of the system, a prototype was built and tested. Promising results have been obtained and are detailed in the Results and Conclusion sections. A very low purchase price and good performance make this design a viable solution for intelligent home energy management, in today’s economic context.

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Around the World massive quantities of energy are consumed in residential buildings leading to a negative impact on the environment. Also, the number of wireless connected devices in use around the World is constantly and rapidly increasing, leading to potential health risks due to over exposer to electromagnetic radiation. An opportunity appears to reduce the energy consumption in residential buildings by introducing smart home automation systems. Multiple such solutions are available in the market with most of them being wireless, so the challenge is to design such systems that would limit the quantity of newly generated electromagnetic radiation. For this we look at several wired, serial communication methods and we successfully test such a method using a simple protocol to exchange data between an Arduino microcontroller board and a Visual C# app running on a Windows computer. We aim to show that if desired, smart home automation systems can still be built using simple viable alternatives to wireless communication.

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The authors appreciate and thank PhD.Prof. Chioran Viorica for her administrative support and Eng. Chioran Ioan for his technical support. Special thanks also go towards the unnamed home-owners that granted access to their homes for energy consumption measurements.