International Journal of Electronics, Electrical and Computational System

IJEECS
ISSN 2348-117X
Volume 6, Issue 5
May 2017

A Smart Prepaid Energy Meter System with GSM Technology

Sharada N. Ohatkar, Tejashree Tarade, Sonali Thigale, Siddhi Surve

SPPU, ENTC Department, Cummins College of Engineering for Women, Pune, India.

Abstract-Nowadays, the difference between the Electricity production and consumption has increased, because of its
large scale usage and consumption. This has lead to the need of tracking the usage by the consumers. Conventional
Energy meters are not consumer friendly. To make it consumer friendly, this paper proposes the smart energy meter with
continuous monitoring of the energy consumption. The energy consumption and electricity bill will be conveyed through
GSM module to the electricity department as well as to the customer. The customer will be able to tailor his needs
accordingly. Also an alert message will be send to the customer when the consumption unit reaches beyond the
threshold. In this paper, energy consumption details will be given in terms of power units. These power units will be
displayed on the LCD and will be sent to the customer and customer will also be able to recharge with the help of PIC
microcontroller and GSM module.
Keywords - PIC micro-controller, Energy meter, LCD display, Buzzer, GSM module.

I. Introduction
In recent years, the demand for electricity consumption has increased in households with the use of different
devices. This has made anxious to many developed and developing nations about the demand in immediate
increase of electricity. At the present time, the consumption and distribution of energy has become a issue of
concern because of large difference in production and consumption of energy. It is the need of the hour that
the consumers should track their daily power usage in their houses. In India, we suffer from scarcity of energy
resources during the day. So, it is the responsibility of human to conserve and control these resources. Many
times consumers face so many problems due to the frequent power failures. Also, the other important reason
for power cut off is due to the unlimited energy usage of rich people. In this aspect, to reduce the power cuts
and to dispense the energy equivalently to all areas, some limits should be put up on the power consumption
of each and every energy consumer. Thus we are trying to present an idea towards a Smart Prepaid Metering
of data for dispensing the electricity smartly for efficient management of power usage. The main snag of
earlier used traditional meters is that they do not provide data to the consumers, which is achieved with the
help of Smart Meter. A Smart Prepaid Meter aids consumer to have the knowledge of power consumption for
the usage of devices in their respective houses. In this proposed system, the consumer will get his energy
consumption data on real time basis. [6,4]
In this section we have provided brief idea of the proposed prepaid energy meter system. Further sections will
provide us with details of recent papers based on energy meter, physical layout of the system, block diagram
with connection flow of the system, outcomes as observed and conclusion and future scope.

II. Literature Survey on Smart Prepaid Meter

In traditional electricity billing a meter reader goes from home to home to get the readings and write down it,
manually. These readings are brought to Electricity administration office. As per the standards, utility billing
is applied on the numbers of units consumed. The employee of the utility goes from home to home again and
gives the bill slips of the utility to the every consumer. There are many flaws in traditional billing system.
Some human error may also occur in manual billing .Analysing the traditional billing some of the common
observed errors and flaws are:

It is a time consuming procedure.

There is a possibility of human error and flaws while taking the manual meter reading.

116 Sharada N. Ohatkar, Tejashree Tarade, Sonali Thigale, Siddhi Surve

 International Journal of Electronics, Electrical and Computational System
IJEECS
ISSN 2348-117X
Volume 6, Issue 5
May 2017


There is no procedure for balanced verification of meter reading.

There is always a possibility of theft and corruption.


Consumer may not get the bill slip within the due date.
As traditional billing contains wastage of time and resources as well, in auto billing system there is no more
need of the manual meter readings and bill slips .Home energy management system(HEMS) that we
developed takes plain energy management mechanism, so that it can be realized more easily. It needs user's
minimal decision and activity for correct judgment. It also uses Automatic Meter Reading (AMR)network
based on power line communication (PLC).In order to share information with customer ZigBee module is also
used. A ZigBee advance metering infrastructure is a present one for automatic meter data collection and
energy auditing and management. In the ZAMI, the system works with multiple channels and frequency
hopping and coexists with potential interferers. In this method if any tariff variation is present then, the new
tariff rate will be changed only through reprogramming the microcontroller otherwise the previous tariff rate
will be displayed on the LCD display. This may cause errors in billing. No intimations are given by the
electricity board to the customer regarding the status of energy consumption. There is no information about
the previous month's consumption and the amount of bill paid. We are going to focus about these draw backs
and overcome in our paper. Also there is limit for transmission distances to 10-100 meters line-of-sight of
ZigBee. [5, 3]

III. Smart Prepaid Energy Meter Proposed System

This chapter explains about the physical layout of the prepaid energy meter system. The physical layout gives
a brief idea of the system as appearing for the consumer.

Fig 3.1 Physical Layout of smart prepaid energy meter system.

The micro-controller will continuously monitor the meter reading and will inform customer about units
consumed through GSM module. Customer can tailor his need accordingly. Microcontroller will inform both
the customer about the total units available for the customer usage and Electricity office about the amount of
the recharge done by the user in order to keep the track of usage of the customer through GSM.
117 Sharada N. Ohatkar, Tejashree Tarade, Sonali Thigale, Siddhi Surve
 International Journal of Electronics, Electrical and Computational System
IJEECS
ISSN 2348-117X
Volume 6, Issue 5
May 2017

In the next section we will see the detailed working of the energy meter system along with the connection
diagram.

IV. Detail Design of Smart Prepaid Energy Meter System

The methodology is explained as follows:
The proposed system consists of an Energy Meter which is connected to the micro-controller through an opto-
isolator IC which provides isolation between Energy Meter and micro-controller. A load is connected to the
meter through a relay which is controlled by micro-controller. In the proposed system fixed electricity units
will be assigned to user at the time of installation of the system. The micro-controller memory will be used for
storing the electricity units. Further as per the consumption of the electricity the fare units will be deducted
from the fixed electricity units assigned at the time of installation and will be displayed continuously on LCD
Display to the user. The Threshold value will be set for unit's consumption so that user will be notified when
electricity usage crosses that particular threshold. The notification is given to the user by Buzzer indication, on
LCD Display and a message will be sent to the user's phone about low electricity unit balance through GSM
module connected to controller. After the low balance indication user can recharge to have usage benefits
according to his requirement. For recharge purpose,users just need to send a code message to the GSM
module interfaced to the proposed system. If the user do not recharge and the units available gets used, the
power will be cut down through relay by microcontroller and an alert message will be also send to user using
GSM module.

The figure 4.1 below explains the methodology of prepaid energy meter and different blocks present in it.

Fig 4.1 Block diagram of smart prepaid energy meter system.

V. Results of Smart Prepaid Energy Meter System

In the fig 5.1 shown is the system with complete connections and power supply ON with load consuming the
power. The user will be provided with an alert message on his registered mobile number whenever his energy
consumption goes below the threshold value. This threshold value is decided by electricity department. In the
fig 5.2 we can see that the user is provided with a message to indicate that his energy consumption is below
threshold.

118 Sharada N. Ohatkar, Tejashree Tarade, Sonali Thigale, Siddhi Surve

 International Journal of Electronics, Electrical and Computational System
IJEECS
ISSN 2348-117X
Volume 6, Issue 5
May 2017

Fig 5.1 System with connections Fig 5.2 Balance low indication to user through message

The user can recharge his system by simply sending a short message service of the units of power has per his
requirement. Also the user will be provided with a message indication to inform him about successful
recharge. This is illustrated in fig 5.3. in order to keep the track of every users usage consumption the
electricity department will also get a message regarding the user recharge and this is shown in fig 5.4 . In case
the user does not recharge his system then the power to the load will be cut-off after consumption of all his
allocated energy units and this is shown in fig 5.5.

Fig 5.3 Successful recharge indication to user Fig 5.4 Indication to electricity department
of user’s recharge

Fig 5.5 Power cut-off after usage of user’s energy units.

119 Sharada N. Ohatkar, Tejashree Tarade, Sonali Thigale, Siddhi Surve

 International Journal of Electronics, Electrical and Computational System
IJEECS
ISSN 2348-117X
Volume 6, Issue 5
May 2017

IX. Conclusion and Future Scope

A consumer friendly and cost effective smart prepaid energy meter is designed which provides with
advantages like reduction in energy consumption. Also transparency between the electricity department and
the users is provided which helps the consumer to monitor his usage. Not only for the consumers but this
system is advantageous to the electricity department by helping them in reducing the labour cost and
providing high efficiency.
The above proposed smart prepaid energy meter system could further be improved by designing an IOT based
centralized web server where the electricity department as well as users can check the status of power usage
allowance and consumption remotely. Also an android based application could be designed where the user can
securely have access to his database.

References
[1] Muhammad Ali Mazidi, Rolin McKinlay, Danny Causey. 2008 PIC Micro-controller and Embedded Systems: Using
assembly and C for PIC 18,
[2] Zahid Iqbal Rana, Muhammad Waseem, Tahir Mahmood. 2014 Automatic Energy Meter Reading using Smart
Energy Meter, ICEET- March2014.
[3] M.Leelavathi, K.Aswini, 2015 Smart Energy meter with reading indication using GSM , IRJET Volume: 02 Issue:
02 | May-2015.
[4] https://www.edgefxkits.com/gsm-based-monthly-electricity-energy-meter-billing-with-sms-upon-gsm-with-user-
programable- number-features-together-with-onsite-display-to-the-user.
[5] https://www.engineersgarage.com/contribution/conventional-energy-meter.
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart-meter
[7] www.rhydolabs.com,SIM900 GSM/GPRS RS232 Modem - User Manual.

120 Sharada N. Ohatkar, Tejashree Tarade, Sonali Thigale, Siddhi Surve