Towards a comparison of low-cost technologies for monitoring the consumption of power

Abstract

The cost of energy has skyrocketed worldwide and monitoring the consumption of electricity could help save money that, in turn, could be invested somewhere else. From individual devices like CNC machines to sets of equipment such as packaging rooms, manufacturing companies are now keen to explore if there are reasonable efficiency processes in place. However, there are many ways to do this. On the one hand, manufacturing companies could look at the half an hour metered electricity records coming from their energy suppliers. However, this might be a coarse grain picture of consumption that discloses very little about individual devices. One of the many alternative options would be retrofitting a digital infrastructure to support power monitoring solutions across the shopfloor. However, this could, arguably, represent a significant financial investment to small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Low-cost technologies like sensors, microcomputers and microcontrollers have been available for many years giving birth to so many familiar devices like mobile phones, voice controlled speakers, smart tv sets, etc. Yet most manufacturing SMEs are still non-digital because of barriers such as the lack of digital skills in the workforce or unforeseen economic costs. Thus, this paper proposes to explore and compare a set of solutions built to monitor electrical power consumption using off-the-shelf low-cost technologies, and with the aim to shed light on technological features as well as market availability and accuracy.