Spreadsheet-Native IoT Energy Monitoring: Design and Functional Demonstration of a Low-Cost ESP8266-PZEM Smart Meter
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.33736/jese.13967.2026Keywords:
Internet of Things, smart meter, ESP8266, PZEM-004T, Google Sheets, energy monitoring, low-cost instrumentationAbstract
Real-time electricity feedback is good for energizing awareness but many Internet of Things (IoT) tracking systems rely on specialized dashboards, recurring services, and infrastructure that is not easy to create in low-resource environments. This paper presents a spreadsheet-oriented smart energy meter that includes a PZEM-004T AC measurement module, an ESP8266 NodeMCU, a local web interface, and Google Apps Script with Google sheets. The edge node registers active power and cumulative energy, discards erroneous sensor outputs, shows real-time readings over Wi-Fi and sends time-stamped data to the cloud spreadsheet. Functional checks proved that the sensing capabilities are usable in a local browser as well as in mobile spreadsheets, validated the cloud data row insertion and automated worksheet archiving. The estimated hardware cost was RM85. The software analysis found an important billing aggregation issue; the aggregation of cumulative energy should not be performed since costs are already cumulative. The current solution uses either new cumulative energy readings or energy reading deltas. The study results do not include the comparison with a calibrated reference meter, the dataset of communication reliability measurements, or the cybersecurity tests. The architecture proposed provides a transparent and accessible platform for the purposes of engineering education, rapid prototyping, and early stage residential energy monitoring research, which establishes the requirements for metrology, communication, security, and electrical safety work before field application.
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