Sockets’ power consumption monitoring system.

Abstract

In Uganda especially in the capital city, Kampala, it is a common practice for businesses to share shops or apartments and as a result they share power. Most of the businesses in these apartments use power drawn from the sockets. Of recent with the introduction of YAKA system in Uganda which acts a prepaid billing system and can be installed in any room, many shop and apartment owners have taken it up. In a single shop or apartment, you can find around four to six businesses sharing the same YAKA meter and also sharing the power bills but none of them can tell how much of the power each consumes to run their businesses. Since the business owners can’t tell how much power is consumed by each individual as they operate their businesses, many of these owners end up having quarrels over power since the power bills are expensive and there is no clear way of billing themselves after the YAKA meter. The development of this system was therefore, motivated by the need to solve this problem. The system is able to solve this problem by monitoring the power consumed by each socket as used by each business in the shop. It displays the power consumption of each business on an LCD in terms of units in real time. When the units of any socket are done, the system is able to turn off the socket automatically and leave the rest that still have units to run which eliminates the problem of people paying overdue. For purposes of demonstration, two simple sockets were connected to the system which to represent the sockets in the real world.