Development of a Low-Cost Arduino Based Power Theft

Abstract

Illegal electricity connections are common malpractice in the developing countries. Power theft has resulted in more losses at the distribution side incurred by service providers. The utility supplier experiences economical losses which leads to high electricity bills being charged on the consumer. This also contributes to distribution system experiencing high technical power losses and transformer damages due to unbalanced or overloading conditions on a single phase. The design and development of a real time low-cost power theft monitoring meter has been addressed in this paper. The established metering system has the capabilities to trace and capture any power anomalies based on comparison of power bought and power used by the end user. ESP01 module was used to upload voltage, current and power to Thing Speak platform, where the operator can monitor power consumed at the end user remotely in real time using a computer or Mobile App. The adequacy of the prototype was tested based on conducted experiments and the results confirms the applicability of the device. The study implementation of the extensively sized device will help in minimizing both technical and financial power losses and faults in the system due to power theft. Keywords— Energy meter, ESP01 module, Mobile App ThingSpeak, Power theft.