With the advent of the Internet comes not only the opportunity to send and receive data from our peers or fellow humans, but also the inherent capacity of devices to send and receive data autonomously.

The consumption of electricity has skyrocketed in recent years, and methods which are costly and of harm to the environment are also mostly used in electricity generation. Therefore, energy monitoring, management and efficiency is of utmost importance to improve the power sector of any economy. A solution to the growing issue of energy monitoring and management is a cheap and smart electricity socket that could show the users the amount of energy and money they spend at every point in time for each of their devices (in monetary terms).

The sockets allow users to set limits to their power usage by permitting switching of their devices on and off remotely. A database of home appliances is also set up to enable awareness on the various energy profiles for different devices and appliances and proffer energy efficient alternatives to such devices based on usage and region, using intelligent web systems. The Smart Socket makes use of the IoT concept of Smart Metering to measure key energy consumption data and will send instantaneous data to a web server to be saved to a database and accessed by permitted users. The sockets would monitor important power and energy readings, store the gathered information and send such information via a network to an Internet server to be accessed by Smartphones, Tablets and Personal Computers. The system possesses a simple GUI on a web server by which consumers can easily access their energy consumption and cost data.

It is a cost effective system as the total cost of the prototype built is about $28 as compared to the price of $99 of the average Smart sockets, which enables it to accomplish purchase cost reduction.

This project primarily addresses the need for access to data and proper information in making informed decisions concerning energy management and usage.