Detection of Tampered Energy Meter with Prepaid Billing using GSM

In this paper, The main objective of this project is to send a message in the event of energy meter being tampered. As electricity consumption is increasing, so it is the attempt for tampering the energy meter. Identifying a tampered meter is only possible when the electricity board’s authority manually checks it, which is a time consuming and costly method. This proposed system is a possible solution to detect meter tampering. Energy meter is integrated with the system in such a way that if anybody opens the cover of the meter, an IR sensing arrangement sends a command to the microcontroller (8051 family). Microcontroller then senses a change in the logical input from IR sensor and gives command to the GSM modem to send an SMS to the designated mobile phone number stored in the controller’s memory. This information also gets displayed on an LCD. The idea of Prepaid energy meter using an AT89S52 microcontroller has been introduced. This concept provides a cost efficient manner of electricity billing. The present energy billing systems are discrete, inaccurate, costly and slow. They are also time and labour consuming. The major drawback of traditional billing system is power and energy theft.