Design and implementation of a multi-tenant prepaid electricity management system (MPEMS) for single phase customers

Abstract

In the year 2011, with the introduction of YAKA system in Uganda which acts as a prepaid billing system and can be installed in any room, many landlords have taken it up. In a single block, you can find around four to six people sharing the same YAKA meter and also sharing the power bills but none of them can tell how much of the power each consumes. Since the tenants can’t tell how much power is consumed by each individual as they have different appliances, many of these tenants 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 tenant. It displays the energy consumption of each tenant on an LCD in real time. When the energy consumption is equal to the allocated units of a particular tenant, the system is able to turn off the specific tenant automatically and leave the rest that still have units to run which eliminates the problem of people paying overdue. For purposes of demonstration, two sockets have been used each representing a single tenant.