Developing countries are increasingly transitioning to continuous 24/7 electricity supply through multi-tier tariff systems. While improving reliability, this transition imposes a financial strain on consumers struggling to manage real-time consumption. This paper proposes a novel IoT-based Demand Side Management (DSM) and Short-Term Load Forecasting (STLF) framework utilizing an inexpensive Raspberry Pi 3 Model B edge gateway. The system was validated using high-resolution field measurements from the Runaki project in Zakho, Kurdistan, collected between December 1, 2025, and April 1, 2026. Among the four regression algorithms evaluated—Linear Regression, SVR, XGBoost, and Random Forest—the Random Forest model demonstrated superior performance, achieving a Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of 0.1152 kW and an R-squared (R2) of 0.9858.