Design and Implementation of Standby Power Saving Smart Socket with Wireless Sensor Network

Most Electrical Appliance in home still use electricity while turned-off. Turned-off electric appliance generally still require standby power when they are plugged in. In this paper we proposed a way to reduce standby power of electric home appliance and ZigBee based smart meter for smart grid application. The proposed socket supplies the appliances with power when the user turns them on. Our socket shuts the electric power off and reduces the standby power to zero when the user turns them off. The proposed design uses a microcontroller unit (MCU) receives signals from a Core Balanced Current Transformer (CBCT) and from a Pyroelectric Infrared (PIR) sensor which detects the user approaching the socket and provides MCU to control the relay On/Off when used as an appliance switch for shutting off the standby power. The components used in the proposed design are low cost and consume only 0.5 W. The MCU monitoring program provides both automatic detection of the user by the PIR sensor and detection of power consumption. The MCU measure the instantaneous current values and send it to data center computer through ZigBee module which acts as a smart meter for smart grid application.