IoT-based Mobile Application for Power Theft

Detection
Bhanu Prakash R, Sheik Bilal E, Suchitha J, Tasmiya Anjum, Dept.Of.CSE,
Sarika C G Assistant Professor of CSE Dept.
C Byregowda Institute of Technology, Kolar
Visvesvaraya Technological University, Belagavi, Karnataka
. into electrical energy. Electricity can be changed to
Abstract— Electricity plays a major role in our daily many energies like heat energy or mechanical energy.
life in the home, offices, industries, public places, So, it is also known as an energy carrier. The electricity
schools, colleges, hospitals, and everywhere in the is generated by using the primary sources at power
world. The energy meter in our homes will display plants. The electricity will reach our homes by
the electricity consumed by the customer and pay the transmission, transformers, and distribution lines. It
Electric Bill (EB) to the government according to the comprises voltage and current. Electricity is neither non-
power consumed in the customer’s home. The energy renewable nor renewable. So, it should be utilized
is transferred from the transformer to the customer’s properly. Electricity’s technical term is “power”, which
home. In most of those cases, when transferring the can be calculated by multiplying the voltage and current,
power from the transformer to the homes, there will Power (P) = Voltage (V) X Current (C). These days,
be a power theft for many reasons. It is essential to because of the development of technology, the
analyse if there is power theft to reduce it. The main development of billings and industries electricity should
aim of this paper is to detect whether the power is be supplied to everywhere when there is need for it.
theft or not by using the Internet of Things (IoT), During transferring the electricity from the transformer
NodeMCU microcontroller, Arduino IoT Cloud, to specific places like homes, schools, offices, and
voltage sensor, and, current sensor. The voltage and industries there will be an electricity theft also known as
current are collected by using the sensors in the power theft. There are many types of power theft, the
54921.2022.9951862

transformer and customer’s home. The power is most common theft is Bypassing and Hooking. To detect
calculated by using the voltage and current through the power theft by monitoring the distribution box and
NodeMCU, then it sends the data to the Arduino IoT
there is no power difference between the transformer and In article [2], power theft is shortly known as a lack of
cloud. When there is a power difference between the the customer’s end continuously by Linear Regression
transformer and the home, then the power is theft. Method [1].
When which is converted from primary energy sources

the home, then the power is not theft. Customers
can view the data through the mobile application of
the Arduino IoT cloud.
Keywords— Electricity, Voltage sensor, Current
sensor, IoT, NodeMCU, Arduino IoT Cloud.
I. INTRODUCTION
The primary energy sources for electricity consist of
solar energy, natural gas, wind energy, coal, and
nuclear energy. The world is using the secondary
energy source of electricity knowledge of the use of
power by the consumer. Theft of power is also a crime
and it is the main issue in India. Countrywide India has
2022 3
voltage is fixed in the raspberry pi. Power theft is
detected when the voltage goes beyond the threshold
value.In this modern world, the entire world is
digitalized as smart energy meters and smart homes.
Traditional methods are replaced by using IoT. The
data of power consumed is calculated manually and this
is reduced by digitalizing the smart meters. This smart
energy meters are also a reason for power theft. Using
Smart Energy Theft System (SETS) can identify how
much power is theft by using the domain of Machine
Learning (ML) and based on statistical models. Three
stages of modules for decision making: 1. Prediction
model – multimodal forecasting system, 2. Primary
decision-making model – Simple Moving Average
(SMA), 3. Secondary decision-making model –energy
theft. This system gives an accuracy of 99.56% that

the overpriced depletion of about 16.2 billion dollars

for power theft. Bypassing theft can be made by
connecting the input and output terminal of the energy
meter to the company side cable or it can be done by
interfering with the energy meter to display less power
consumption. The power theft is detected by using the
raspberry-Pi. The threshold value of current and
promotes the protection of smart homes based on IoT
[3].
In paper [4], the electricity transformation is done
from the distribution place where the electricity is
generated. In the distribution end, there will be a low

1
 voltage this is also one of the reasons for power theft
and because of this issue, the companies will lose
billions annually. The Information Communication
Technology (ICT) and smart meters will resolve the
problem of power theft detection and alerting. The
applications of IoT and Android are used to detect
power theft. Android application to monitor the power
consumption, alerting the consumers when the power is
theft and giving the information of billing electricity to
the consumers. With the use of an ATmega328P
microcontroller and for a Wi-Fi module NodeMCU is
connected to the microcontroller to validate the system.
In the consumer’s house, there will be the
implementation of Smart energy Meters (SMs) and
Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) to transmit
the power readings to the System Operator (SO) for
billing and energy management. However, to decrease
the billing amount of the electricity, consumers
established cyberattacks for power theft. Machine
Learning models are used to find the attackers [5].
ySection 2 carries the proposed method of the
implemented process, Section 3 includes hardware
implementation, Section 4 contains the software
description which is used for this project, Section 5
explains the result and discussion in detail and finally,
Section 6 ends with the conclusion of this article.
II. PROPOSED WORK
The primary objective of this paper is to find
is there any power theft during the transmission from
power distribution to the consumer’s home. Stealing
electricity is a criminal or illegal process that leads to
the loss of crores in the Indian economy. The stealing
can be done by various methods like energy meter
Bypassing and Hooking the electric cable. To detect
and prevent electricity theft from various methods this
study is implemented by using IoT, NodeMCU,
sensors, and Arduino IoT cloud. Figure 1 shows the
proposed method of this study in diagrammatical
representation.
Fig:1 Pictorial Representation of Proposed Method
The above Figure 1 shows the proposed method
for this paper. There will be a voltage sensor and current
sensor in the transformer and consumer’s home. The
sensors in the transformer acquire the amount of data
transmitting the power to the consumer’s home. The
voltage sensor and current sensor in the consumer’s
home receive the amount of power and sense the power
consumed by the consumer. The electricity theft can be
stolen by unauthorized tapping between the distribution
center and the receiver center. The power is calculated as
Power = Voltage X Current (P = V*C). The power of the
transformer that transmits to the home is 250 Watt (W).
When the voltage sensor and current sensor in the
consumer’s home give the consumed power of the same
250W, then the power is not theft. If the power
difference between the transformer and the house is more
than 1, then there detects a power theft. the block
diagram of the proposed method is shown in Figure 2.
Fig: 2 Block Diagram
In Figure 2, voltage sensor 1 and current sensor
1 are the transformer sensors. The voltage sensor 2 and
current sensor 2 are the home sensors where these
sensors are in the consumer’s home. These four sensors
are interfaced with the NodeMCU microcontroller.
NodeMCU is programmed with power calculation, the
power difference between the transformer and the home
and also programmed as 1 is negligible to detect whether
power is theft or not. The sensors acquire the voltage and
current value and send it to the microcontroller. The
NodeMCU calculates the received data and transmits the
power data to the Arduino IoT Cloud. On receiving the
data from the microcontroller, the cloud gives the output
as power theft and no power theft after examining the
input data. The cloud sends the output data to visualize
the data in the mobile application of Arduino IoT Cloud.
For power theft detection the power difference can be 1
is negligible. If the power difference is more than
negligible value, then the power theft detection detects as
power is theft. If the power difference is in negligible
value, then there is no power theft.
III. HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS
The necessary hardware products for power theft
detection contain voltage sensors, current sensors, and
NodeMCU. The supply of voltage to the transformer
and the home is measured by the voltage sensor. The
 current sensor measures the amount of current flow to
the transformer and the home. With these two-value
power is calculated in the transformer and home. The
voltage sensor and current sensor from the
transformer attached to the home are interfaced with
the NodeMCU microcontroller. The sensor’s values
are sent to the NodeMCU to calculate the power value
to detect power theft.
A. Voltage sensor
A voltage sensor is used to monitor and measures the
voltage in an electrical object. This sensor will find
out the voltage in Alternate Current (AC) and also in
Direct Current (DC). The transformer will have 230V
of voltage in a single phase. The voltage transformer
sensor is the absolute that measures the voltage in AC.
This will help to measure the voltage up to 250V
because of its good consistency and high accuracy [6].
The voltage sensor is used in this article to measure
the voltage in the distribution line and to calculate the
power to detect theft.
Arduino IoT cloud should subscribe to the plan. Arduino
IoT Cloud has many features such as Data monitoring,
Scheduler, Webhooks, Variable synchronization, Over
the Air (OTA) uploads. The cloud supports Wi-Fi-
enabled boards like ESP8266 or ESP32 microcontrollers.
The Wi-Fi should have a minimum of
2.4GHz frequency to send the data to the cloud. To
configure the ESP8266 or ESP32 microcontroller choose
the thirdparty option in the setup device. Arduino IoT
Cloud can connect with Arduino, ESP32, and LoRa-1276
with a Wi-Fi module [11]. Arduino IoT Cloud has a
mobile application and can also login to the cloud via the
browser. Through the mobile application, the user can
find the data easily and quickly. The data sent from the
NodeMCU to the cloud, the cloud will detect whether
there is power theft or not and transmits the data to the
mobile application of the user in the data visualization
feature. The user can notice the data in the mobile
application whenever they want. Figure 3, shows the
homepage of Arduino IoT Cloud.

B. Current sensor

A current sensor is a measuring device that

measures and detects the electrical signal in a network
or a cable and converts it into a readable value [7].
This sensor computes the flow of current in a wire. If
there is an excess flow of current in any device that
will lead to a short circuit and this may affect the
working of that specific device. The output of the
current sensor in a transformer is 4-20mA in DC. In
this paper, a current sensor is used to detect the
current flowing through the transmission line and to
calculate the power to detect the theft of power
between the transmission line and the home.

C. NodeMCU
NodeMCU is a microcontroller that is an IoT
accessthesoftware. NodeMCU board consists of a built-in
Wi-Fi module of ESP8266 [8]. The scope of voltage for
the microcontroller is from 3V to 3.6V, this controller
also contains Linear and low-dropout (LDO) regulates
the voltage to hold on the stable range of 3.3V [9]. With
the use of Arduino IDE, it can be programmable and
upload the program to the microcontroller by connecting
the board and to the Central Processing Unit (CPU) by
using Universal Serial Bus (USB) cable.

IV. SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS

Arduino IoT Cloud is an online platform that is
provided by the Arduino community in the IoT platform.
This cloud gives an end-to-end answer for different
projects to make it the easy way. We can transmit and
receive the data from the IoT platform devices to the
Arduino IoT Cloud platform [10]. This cloud has a
subscription plan, for new users, it gives free access for
limited days then if the user wants to continue to use the

978-1-6654-9764-0/22/$31.00 ©2022 IEEE 484


From the above-given Figure 3, the distributed
power is the power that is transmitted power from the
transformer to the home. Consumed power is the
receiving power of the home. The power difference will
show the difference in transmitting and receiving the
power.
V. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION The foremost
intention of this article is to detect power theft
during the transmission from power distribution
to the consumer’s home. To detect and prevent
electricity theft from various methods this study
is implemented by using IoT, NodeMCU,
voltage sensor, current sensor, and Arduino IoT
Fig 3: Home Page of Arduino IoT Cloud
.
cloud. There will be a voltage sensor and
current sensor in the transformer and
consumer’s home. The sensors in the
transformer acquire the amount of data
transmitting the power to the consumer’s home.
The voltage sensor and current
FIG 4:Simulation Page of Arduino IoT Cloud:
with no power theft
The above figure 4, displays from the Arduino IoT
Cloud as no power theft is detected. The power is
displayed in the cloud as a graph to monitor the power
for 15 days, 7 days, 1 day, and 1 hour and can also
monitor live. In the distributed power, the power is
increasing from approximately 210W to 250W. The
sensor in the consumer’s home receive the amount of
power from the transformer and sense the power
consumed in the consumer’s home. The power sends
out from the distribution line to the home is 250W. In
the consumer’s home while taking the reading in the
energy meter it should be approximately 250W. The
difference between the power in the transformer and
the consumer’s home can be and it is negligible.
The data from the sensors are transmitted to the
NodeMCU microcontroller. The NodeMCU will
calculate the power by using the voltage and current
data from the transformer and at home with the
programmed code in the microcontroller. The
NodeMCU will transfer the data to the Arduino IoT
Cloud and it will detect the power theft according to
the power difference. If the power difference is
negligible then there is no power theft. If the
difference is more than negligible value then the power
is theft. Consumers can visualize the data in
the Arduino IoT Cloud through the mobile
application. The consumer can also log in to the
Arduino IoT Cloud in the browser. Figure 4
displays.
power is distributed continuously from the transformer to
the home. The
consumed power is also showing for 15 days, 7 days, 1
day, 1 hour and in live. In figure 4, the consumed power
in the graph shows that the power is increasing to 250W.
There is no major difference in the graph. In the power
difference frame, the difference is 1.320, which is
negligible. So, the

978-1-6654-9764-0/22/$31.00 ©2022 IEEE 486

Fig 5: Simulation Page of
Theft
The above-given
figure 5, shows the power
theft detection in Arduino
IoT Cloud. The output in
figure 5, displays the live
measuring in distributed
and consumed power. The
consumer can view the
flow of power in the
distributed power for the
past 15 days, past 7 days,
past a day, and even for 1
hour with the timing. In the
distributed power, the
power is increasing from
approximately 210W to
280W. So, the distribution
of power to the home is
280W. In consumed power,
the graph shows that the
power is increasing from
210W, but from the past 7
days from the timing of
15.31, the power is
consuming the same 250W.
The distributed power is
280W but the consumed
power is 250W. So, there is
a theft occurred. The power
difference in the window
shows a 34.830 difference,
it is more when compared
to a negligible value. The
power theft is detected by
blink in Light Emitting
Diode (LED) presents in
the theft detecting window
on the cloud page. So,
when the power theft is
detected, the consumer can
view the data in the data
visualization of Arduino
IoT Cloud.
Arduino IoT Cloud: Power
VI.
CONCLUSION
In today’s modern
world, electricity plays a
vital role in day-to-day life.
In the early days, electricity
is important for cooking
and lighting by using foil
fuels. Nowadays, there is a
need for more electricity to
survive. Electricity is
produced from various
natural resources like
water, wind, coal, and fire.
Thermal energy is by using
fire, hydro energy using
water, and wind energy
using a windmill. These
energies are used to
generate electricity in
power plants. The
electricity is distributed to
various power stations to
distributing to cities, towns,
and villages. The power is
transferred from
transformer to home.
Electricity is neither
renewable nor non-
renewable. Power theft is
occurring because of more
reasons. Because of the
power theft, the country
will decrease in their
country’s economy. To
determine the power theft
Voltage sensor, the Current
sensor, NodeMCU, and
Arduino IoT Cloud are
used. The sensors in the
transformer and home get
5
the voltage and current
value and convert it into
power by using a Theft Detection and Smart
microcontroller. The
microcontroller will send
the power to the cloud, then
the cloud will examine the
data of power difference
and the consumer can
visualize the data in the
mobile application of
Arduino IoT Cloud
whether there is a power
difference between the
transformer and home, the
power theft detection LED
will blink in the cloud
application. If there is no
power theft, the detection
LED will not blink in the
cloud application.
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