To measure how much electricity a single home appliance uses:
For plug in appliances the kill-a-watt is pretty good. For bigger stuff you need a clamp on amp meter. Simple appliances can be pretty easy but bigger things vary more based on other factors. Like your fridge will use a lot less power while you are on vacation verses at home as well as possibly different weekday verses weekend. Heating and cooling will depend on the outside conditions.
"mileometer" ??
"Don Phillipson" wrote in news:ill5ro$52q$ snipped-for-privacy@speranza.aioe.org:
there's a device called Kill-A-Watt that measures power consumption,very simple to use. some utilities have loaner programs so you can borrow one instead of buying one. they cost about $22-30 USD,depending on where you buy.
There is a consumer device called a "kill a watt" which will show you the running cost of an appliance. The local big box stores carry them now, as does HF, for under $30.00.
Alternately, sometimes you can find old utility meters (a watt-hour meter) for sale on the surplus market (or ebay, such as
Jon
Oh please, I thought everybody knew about these folks. You can buy a refurbished single phase meter for under $20.00 from Hialeah Meter. :-)
Get a "Kill-A-Watt" meter. Roughly $30. Anyone can use it.
Various functions of the "Kill-A-Watt" are:
My experience is that watts are rounded down in some way, and the meter can read low by up to about 1 watt.
Yup, just be sure you get a meter base (another $10) on that site.
Find Kh rating on meter description plate. It will be something like Kh
3.2>7.2 etc. Take 3600 times Kh times revolutions Watch Black mark on dial. Divide by the amount of seconds of total revolutions.Like this 3600 times Kh3.2 = 11520 times revolutions say you checked with
5 =57600. divide by seconds if you have 33 seconds the wattage would be 1745.5 watts.... WW
Well there are different meters for different purposes:
1.) Ammeters give you an instant reading of the current flowing in the circuit at the moment of analysis... While this is a useful thing for some purposes, demand (current draw) changes as things cycle on and off so you would have to figure out exactly what is operating the moment you make your reading...2.) The equivalent of a mileometer (which most people know as an ODOMETER) but for electrical usage... That is a watt-hour meter... Like the one your electrical company uses to measure how much electricity you have used... Basic home meters just measure your kWh used but there are commercial meters which in addition to measuring usage will also indicate what is called the "peak demand" which can put the user into a different billing rate depending on what that peak demand is...
3.) What are you looking to do with your watt-hour meter, the Kill-a-watt meter suggested by others here is only intended to be used for a single point-of-use measurement... There are other systems which can cost a whole lot more than $500 which can measure your electrical use by circuit from your home's electrical panel and transmit that information to a web-interface to give you a live breakdown of what electricity is being used in your home...I used to work in a building where we has quite a number of E-Mon D-Mon type sub-metering monitors installed on various types of loads (lighting, HVAC, elevator/escalator) for determining the actual cost of Common Area Maintenance (CAM) which was divided up and charged to the tenants at a rate per square foot of space leased... E-Mon D-Mon monitors were also utilized to bill for electrical use in individual rooms in a section of the building which was used for executive office suites where an individual or business could rent fully equipped and furnished rooms with a receptionist and administrative support provided...
~~ Evan
On Mon, 14 Mar 2011 17:57:35 +0000 (UTC), snipped-for-privacy@manx.misty.com (Don Klipstein) wrote Re Re: Electricity consumption:
See it at:
You ned more than a clamp-on ammeter to get the information the OP is requesting. You need a power meter. I had (likely still have somewhere) an old utility meter that I used to measure the amount of power consumed by the charger for my electric car.
Watt kind of electric car did you have?
It was a conversion of a 1975 Fiat 128L Sport coupe, running an aircraft generator for a motor, through the 4 speed tranny with a simple resistor start, dual voltage power controller with field weakening.. It started on 24 volts through a stainless steel ribbon resistor, which was then shorted out feeding full current, then switched to 48 volts with the resistor back in the circuit for about 1 second, then shorted back out. Putting the accellerator down further weakened the shunt feild of the compound wound motor, causing it to speed up. The dual voltage setup was a series parallel arrangement using a single contactor and a diode set.
8 GC2H golf cart batteries drove it about 30 miles at 50mph, or 50 miles at 30mph, on a single ($0.25 at the time) charge. That was roughly equivalent, cost-wize, to 200 MPG at 30MPH with gas at about a buck a gallon.
Yeah, they are real convenient to hook up.
Not !!!
Andy
It's the watt-hour meter on the wall of your house where the electricty comes in.
Sounds cool.
Have you noticed, at least it's my impression, that when they give mpg for current hybrid cars, they totally ignore the electricity? AFAICT, they just take the miles driven and divide by the gallons of gasoline used. Or do they do it right and just not explain it?
I'm not talking about auto mags, that I'm sure do it right, but about tv news shows, the network evening news, etc.
A CT type meter would be a lot easier but it just takes a little work to install a meter box. Been there done that,...a lot. ^_^
TDD
Hybrids are not plugged in so there is no electricity cost. The batteries are charged when the car is decelerating.
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