The application discloses a non-invasive electrical appliance identification method based on a
harmonic similarity
algorithm. The method comprises the following steps: 1, first, learning process is carried out on the electrical appliance to be identified, in the learning process, the fundamental active power, the fundamental reactive power, the active power of each
harmonic and the reactive power of each
harmonic of each sample electrical appliance under the rated condition are measured; 2, the operation number N of the electrical appliance identification
algorithm is initialized, N=0, and the N=N+1 operation is started; 3, the
voltage and
current time domain data of the unknown electrical appliance on the
bus are collected; 4, the collected
voltage and
current time domain data are converted into
frequency domain data through
fast Fourier transform (FFT); 5, according to the current and
voltage harmonics of different frequencies in the
frequency domain data, the total fundamental active power, the active power of each harmonic and the reactive power of each harmonic under the current
power consumption state are calculated. The non-invasive electrical appliance identification method based on the harmonic similarity provided by the application has a wider application occasion compared with the prior art.