Abstract:
Illegal electricity connections are common malpractice in
the developing countries. Power theft has resulted in more losses at
the distribution side incurred by service providers. The utility
supplier experiences economical losses which leads to high electricity
bills being charged on the consumer. This also contributes to
distribution system experiencing high technical power losses and
transformer damages due to unbalanced or overloading conditions on
a single phase. The design and development of a real time low-cost
power theft monitoring meter has been addressed in this paper. The
established metering system has the capabilities to trace and capture
any power anomalies based on comparison of power bought and
power used by the end user. ESP01 module was used to upload
voltage, current and power to ThingSpeak platform, where the
operator can monitor power consumed at the end user remotely in
real time using a computer or Mobile App. The adequacy of the
prototype was tested based on conducted experiments and the results
confirms the applicability of the device. The study implementation of
the extensively sized device will help in minimizing both technical
and financial power losses and faults in the system due to power
theft.
