Design And Construction Of Monthly Electricity Billing With SMS Feactures

ABSTRACTThe project provides a system that allows for consumed electricity reading in units as well as the amount charged over it to the user. This system provides the electricity readings on an LCD screen as well as can sms this reading and cost in rupees to the user. This lets the user know about his exact electricity units consumed and cost directly from his meter so that there is no chance of bill tampering. The project allows a two way reading. One on LCD display and the second on sms. Our project consists of n gsm modem connected to a microcontroller of 8051 family. The system continuously monitors electrical pulses and calculates the unit consumption. The system then uses the cost of each unit to calculate the electricity cost. It then sends all this data to user and electric company via sms and also displays it on an LCD screen for viewing. The system can be further enhanced to receive user messages and control load operations. CHAPTER ONE1.0                                                        INTRODUCTIONMonthly Electricity Billing Display System Features using pic microcontroller: Monthly electricity billing display system with bill SMS features is a system, that would be given the monthly electricity bill intimation to the customer automatically through mobile SMS and this bill intimation would be before the supply company such as PHCN (as used in Nigeria) monthly bill. Nowadays, the PHCN or other supply companies are paying over charge because mostly customers do not have the time to check the meter reading or do not have the information how to the calculate the monthly electricity bill therefore the supply companies are taking the benefits of their negligence. On keeping these issues, we have designed a system that is called a monthly electricity billing display system with bill SMS features with the help of PIC microcontroller 18F452, max232, energy meter, opto coupler, LCD display and GSM modem. This system could be installed with customer energy meter and displays the energy meter reading with their consumable units and cost. By using this system, the customers can easily know their energy meter reading, monthly bill at their mobile phones through SMS and can save their time and over charging of supply companies.1.1                                         BACKGROUND OF THE PROJECTElectrical power has become indispensable to human survival and progress. Apart from efforts to meet growing demand, automation in the energy distribution is also necessary to enhance people’s life standard. Traditional meter reading by human operator is inefficient to meet the future residential development needs. So there is increased demand for Automatic Meter Reading (AMR) systems which collects meter readings electronically, and its application is expanding over industrial, commercial and utility environment.Electronic utility meters are an important step towards automating the utility metering process. Automated utility meters have many new features that help to reduce the cost of utilities to customers and the cost of delivering utilities to the utility provider. The onset of rural electrification provides opportunities for new and more efficient metering technologies to be implemented. Traditional electro-mechanical meters, still widely used today, are prone to drift over temperature and time as a result of the analogue and mechanical nature of the components in these meters. Collection of meter readings is also inefficient, because a meter reader has to physically be on site to take the readings. This method of collecting of meter readings becomes more problematic and costly when readings have to be collected from vast, and often scattered rural areas. Meter readers are reluctant to make the effort to travel to such areas and will often submit inaccurate estimations of the amount of electricity consumed. For households at the top of high buildings and luxury housing plots, traditional meter reading is highly inefficient.There exists chance for missing bills, absence of consumer etc. Even though these conventional meters were replaced with more efficient electronic energy meters these problems still persists. So a system which will provide the bill in users mobile will be more suitable in the current scenario. Here a new method of postpaid electronic energy metering is introduced in this paper which will automatically sense the used energy, records these reading continuously, then sends it to the billing point through the existing GSM network. Finally after processing the collected data bill is generated using a web based system software and is send back to the customer as SMS (Short Messaging System).As it is web oriented once the data is updated, the registered users and authority can monitor and analyse the generated bill of any month by sitting anywhere in the world1.2                                             OBJECTIVE OF THE PROJECTThe objective of this work is to design an electronics device that provides the electricity bill readings on an LCD screen as well as can SMS this reading and cost to the user

1.3                                         APPLICATIONS OF THE PROJECT

This monthly electricity billing display system could be used with domestic and industrial energy meters for receiving the monthly bill intimation at customer mobile phone.

1.4                                          ADVANTAGES OF THE PROJECT

1. By using this system, the customers can easily check their monthly electricity bill and then compare their bills with supply company bills or PHCN and save from over charging.
2. This system is more compact, reliable and less costly as compared to other systems.
3. This system calculates the monthly electricity bill more precisely as compared to the other systems.
4. This system is more efficient and easy to install as compared to the other systems.

1.5                                                 SCOPE OF THE PROJECTIn this proposed system, the consumer will get his energy consumption data on real time basis on a LCD display. The same data is sent through GSM modem to the electricity department via SMS. A microcontroller of 8051 family is interfaced to the energy meter to get the Watt Hour pulses.The microcontroller then processes these pulses according the program written in it, to calculate the units consumed and cost involved. Further it gives command to the SIM loaded GSM modem for sending the data to the electricity department via SMS.1.6                                                  DEFINITION OF TERMS The following terms were used in this work and their meanings are as below:

1. SMS – Short Messaging System.
2. GSM – Global System for Mobile Communications

• PHCN- Power Holding Company of Nigeria

1. AMR – Automatic Meter Reading
2. LCD – liquid-crystal display

1.7                                        PROJECT WORK ORGANIZATIONThe various stages involved in the development of this project have been properly put into five chapters to enhance comprehensive and concise reading. In this project thesis, the project is organized sequentially as follows:Chapter one of this work is on the introduction to the study. In this chapter, the background, significance, objective, application and scope of the study were discussed.Chapter two is on literature review of this study. In this chapter, all the literature pertaining to this work was reviewed.Chapter three is on design methodology. In this chapter all the method involved during the design and construction were discussed.Chapter four is on testing analysis. All testing that result accurate functionality was analyzed.Chapter five is on conclusion, recommendation and references.