Monjolo. Energy-harvesting energy meters.

Conventional AC power meters perform at least two distinct functions: power conversion, to supply the meter itself, and energy metering, to measure the load consumption. This paper presents Monjolo, a new energy-metering architecture that combines these two functions to yield a new design point in the metering space.

The key insight underlying this work is that the output of a current transformer -- nominally used to measure a load current -- can be harvested and used to intermittently power a wireless sensor node. The hypothesis is that the node's activation frequency increases monotonically with the primary load's draw, making it possible to estimate load power from the interval between activations, assuming the node consumes a fixed energy quanta during each activation. This paper explores this thesis by designing, implementing, and evaluating the Monjolo metering architecture.

The results demonstrate that it is possible to build a meter that draws zero-power under zero-load conditions, offers high accuracy for near-unity power factor loads, works with non-unity power factor loads in combination with a whole-house meter, wirelessly reports readings to a data aggregator, is resilient to communication failures, and is parsimonious with the radio channel, even under heavy loads. Monjolo eliminates the high-voltage AC-DC power supply and AC metering circuitry present in earlier designs, enabling a smaller, simpler, safer, and lower-cost design point that supports novel deployment scenarios like non-intrusive circuit-level metering.