Smart plug and circuit breaker technologies for residential buildings in the US

A significant proportion of the total energy in conventional homes across the United States is used by electric plug loads, which include various electronic devices and home appliances, excluding the heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) units and electric water heaters. Considerable energy savings are expected to be possible by managing these plug loads effectively based on user behavior data. Smart plugs and circuit breakers that can control and monitor energy usage on a real-time basis are becoming increasingly popular alongside the rapid development of smart home energy management. This paper reviews the recent advances on the subject matter with emphasis on the feasibility of energy monitoring and the flexibility of system integration. A relatively low cost laboratory implementation, using a general-purpose single-board computer, which was was designed, built, and tested in order to provide enhanced power quality monitoring capabilities and to support research in this fast growing area, is described together with experimental sample results.