Another week, another Solution from the National University of Lesotho (NUL)! This time it is from Leloko Lepolesa, a fifth year B.Eng Electronics student supervised by Mr Seforo Mohlalisi, and his smart electricity meter that tracks your electricity usage every second!
It is designed to save your hard-earned money. You will like it!
Here is how the system performs its tricks! It tracks the use of electricity in your homes and your organizations and it plots the usage for you on a graph as it happens or in real-time (as the elites will put it).
In other words, you will know which appliances gulp your electricity, leaving you in poverty and you will shut them off or use them sparingly. And you will know which one of your bad energy use habits (like forgetting to put off lights in the morning) are wasteful and you will change them!
And if you can’t change your habits (habits are hard to change, O!), “the system also has an alert component that sends SMS to alert you when you are wasting electricity,” Lepolesa revealed. “And it allows you to remotely switch off any appliances, wherever you are, through internet connection. But as for now, I am using Wi-Fi to avoid SMS costs.”
If you were to use his design, you could save quite a lot of money, perhaps enough to send you on a tourist trip to Hawaii and back, or Vancouver and back—look! It’s your choice.
In his fourth year, Lepolesa started a journey that would lead him to this smart design. He studied the essence of mini-grids.
You see, electricity providers build grids to provide electricity. Some grids are large such as the one that provides electricity to the whole of Lesotho by Lesotho Electricity Corporation (LEC).
But some grids are small and can supply just a village or a small town such as the grid in Semonkong. Those are called mini-grids and they were the focus of Lepolesa’s attention.
As he studied the grids, he was particularly interested in the means of electricity loss in the grids and how such losses are prevented.
And he bumped across an idea of smart meters. And he fell in love with the idea.
From then, he was determined to design one in his fifth year project—which he did. He built his system from scratch, with an eye on applying it to save a host of electricity wastage issues in Lesotho and beyond.
At the moment, Lepolesa’s system is connected to a computer but in application, it can just be connected to any screen of choice. Let’s picture this; there you are, busy enjoying electricity usage by your various appliances in your home.
And there you are, watching TV, enjoying the warmth from a heater in a cold winter day whilst waiting while your coffee is getting ready in your electric kettle.
As all that happens, something is doing the work for you, his system is busy plotting real-time graphs of the following: current versus time, power versus time and units left (not used) versus time. What a mine of information!
That information is stored in a database for you to retrieve as and when you need it. At the moment, the readings move to an SQL database through Wi-Fi or Bluetooth connection and the storage process is automatic.
“You can retrieve this data for any period of time and study your electricity use during any period,” he said. The system has “start” and “end” dates selections for you to study any period you want.
But, before we finish, let’s say more about this one—it is so important!
Who amongst us have not left electric heaters, lights or even cooking stoves for long over the intended time of use, perhaps leaving them on when we go for work or school in hurry, only to come back and find that the electricity has wiped off like never before?
How often most of us regret such a stupid thing which, nonetheless, we continue repeating!
Don’t despair.
Lepolesa’s system has a complete solution for that as well. Let’s suppose you left your lights on as you left at 5.00 am. When it is 7.00 am, the system senses that something is wrong, lights can’t still be on at this time.
But wait a minute, it doesn’t automatically switch off your lights—what if you left them on, on purpose? Instead it sends you an sms, “Hi there, did you realize you left your lights on?”
If it was not on purpose, you use an app on your cellphone and, there we go! You can switch your lights off, from where ever you are; it is a remote controlled system at work.
It is that simple and, of course, no one is hurt.
But Lepolesa is bright. His system is not informed by hearsay, “bobare.” It is based on scientific studies. “Studies I have consulted show that when people are aware of how much electricity they are using and which habits are wasteful, they are more likely to reduce their electricity consumption than if they are clueless,” concluded the brilliant NUL scholar.