Yay - an open-hardware energy measurement system for feedback and appliance detection based on the arduino platform

To analyse user behaviour and energy consumption data in contemporary and future households, we need to monitor electrical appliance features as well as ambient appliance features. For this purpose, a distributed measurement system is required, which measures the entire power consumption of the household, the power consumption of selected household appliances, and the effect of these appliances on their environment. In this paper we present a distributed measurement system that records and monitors electrical household appliances. Our low-cost measurement system integrates the YaY smart meter, a set of smart plugs, and several networked ambient sensors. In conjunction with energy advisor tools the presented measurement system provides an efficient low-cost alternative to commercial energy monitoring systems by surpassing them with machine learning techniques, appliance identification methods, and applications based on load disaggregation.