MEDAL: A Cost-Effective High-Frequency Energy Data Acquisition System for Electrical Appliances

Traditional energy measurement fails to provide support to consumers to make intelligent decisions to save energy. Non-intrusive load monitoring is one solution that provides disaggregated power consumption profiles. Machine learning approaches rely on public datasets to train parameters for their algorithms, most of which only provide low-frequency appliance-level measurements, thus limiting the available feature space for recognition. In this paper, we propose a low-cost measurement system for high-frequency energy data. Our work utilizes an off-the-shelf power strip with a voltage-sensing circuit, current sensors, and a single-board PC as data aggregator. We develop a new architecture and evaluate the system in real-world environments. The self-contained unit for six monitored outlets can achieve up to 50 kHz for all signals simultaneously. A simple design and off-the-shelf components allow us to keep costs low. Equipping a building with our measurement systems is more feasible compared to expensive existing solutions. We used the outlined system architecture to manufacture 20 measurement systems to collect energy data over several months of more than 50 appliances at different locations, with an aggregated size of 15 TB.