Design of Automatic Power Factor Corrector for Home Electric Power Saving Using Esp8266
Umar Tsani Abdurrahman1*, Tri Dharma Putra2, Ashari Imammuddin1, Mohamad Anas Sobarnas1, Iskandar1, Asep Saepudin1

1Sekolah Tinggi Teknologi Muhammadiyah Cileungsi
2Department of informatics faculty of computer science. Universitas Bhayangkara Jakarta Raya, Indonesia

Abstract

Energy has and always be one of a key sector in human daily life. In almost every home electric utility is usually a major energy provider. The usage for each home is measured by providing an electricity meter in which the bill for each customer is charged. However this measurement is affected by the power factor value of the home or entity being measured, ideal power factor is 1.0 (unity) for a pure resistive load which means 100 percent of the energy is being correctly measured and billed. However any inductive loads which are given by any electric motors operated such as ACs, water pumps, refrigerators, fans, transformers which usually are presented in every home will cause power factor to be less than unity, can ranging from 0.9 to 0.4. this results a energy bill that should not be paid by the customer and cannot be corrected in factor of 10% to 70% more than it should be. Unless in the customer electric instalation the power factor correction is made by a shunt capacitor/capacitor bank/power saver. However, even using this capacitor bank can rarely achieve a unity power factor since the load always vary and changing, both the resistive and inductive. To be able to achieve optimal value, one has always adjust the value of the shunt capacitor bank to as close as the value needed to compensate the inductive loads. Therefore we are tryin to use microcontrollers (MCU) to control and achieve as close as possible unity power factor. Also to be able to suits latest development in the MCU world we are using ESP8266 which help to provide monitoring and optimalization via internally included web server in a small and power efficient platform. This paper is describing a guideline in designing such device. Keywords: power factor, optimal correction, power saving, esp8266

Keywords: capacitor bank, home electric, power factor

Topic: Engineering and Technology