Internet of things (iot) makes it convenient for smart homes to monitor, control and manage the house environment according to residents and makes the concept of deployment of smart homes more realistic. considering a series of problems where the owner is not present in the house and sudden gas fumes erupt in the kitchen or someone sneaks in resulting in burglary or something massive that cannot be forecasted, paves the way for the proposal of a remote monitoring system of the entire house based on wireless sensor network (wsn). our work presents the design of a smart home with various sensor networks in each of the rooms like living room, kitchen area and main corridor of the house; with each sensor node being powered by solar energy from a photovoltaic (pv) panel through a maximum power point tracking (mppt) controller. the data is then wirelessly transmitted over zigbee network for online monitoring and the proposed smart home appliances are also controlled via bluetooth-interfaced smart phone. in cities, where people are too busy and tend to forget to switch off their room lights and fans, the dht11 sensor can come useful as it functions using a single tap on the smart phone and also helps in energy saving as it is dependent on a threshold value of the temperature set by the user. for example, if the temperature of the living room goes above a certain value, it will automatically switch itself on. and when the temperature is below the threshold value, it will remain switched off. basically, when the sensors are in their passive state, they consume minimal energy. moreover, it takes care of comfort level of the user also. now, when suppose there is a gas leakage in the kitchen and the user is unavailable in the house, then the mq-2 sensor detects the concentration of the leaked gas in the kitchen and again if it is above a set fixed value, it sends a message to the user's smart phone and also blinks the led light in our developed prototype. in this way, it can save the lives of many households from a disaster. also, to prevent theft in the house in the absence of the owner, we have made use of the pir motion detection sensor. this will raise an alarm in the form a beep or a buzzing sound when someone sneaks into the house when no one is present. it gives a notification to the user in his smart phone. thus, we have made our prototype of a smart home very much user-friendly. it is also environment-friendly that pledges to manage energy in an efficient manner by the use of solar photovoltaic panels. here, the function of the pv panels is to power the network the sensors and during the night time, i.e. post sunset, the energy is stored in a battery. a buck maximum power point tracking (mppt) controller reduces the voltage output of the panels which is 12 v to an optimal level which is within safe limits as the input to the sensors. we believe smart homes are the face of the future as they merge the most advanced technology together with energy optimization by using the renewable sources. so, in a few years down the line, when all homes start using energy consciously, and when smart phones dominate every person's hand, we can think of achieving a cleaner, greener and a user-friendly community of smart homes. so, this is the intention behind designing and developing a solar powered iot based smart home monitoring system