OVO plan offers

[Andrew]

Have fun finding someone to fix it when it goes wrong and any or all of the original 'installers' have done a pheonix

[Davey]

I read mine when I get up, before going downstairs. The meter cupboard is in the bedroom. Doing it then makes it easier to remember the reading for when I have fired up the PC!

[me9]

Mine has a wall wart giving out LV AC so that it can read power factor, KVAr and genuine KW.

[SteveW]

And if that had happened, there would have been a reasonable expectation of a court case against the regulator/government for failing to regulate properly and creditors at all the other utilties would have demanded their balances back, causing more companies to fail.

[bert]

The failure of the regulator was to allow the suppliers to use advance payments for current expenditure.

[Paul]

For a plugin device, you can use a Kill-O-Watt. It can accurately evaluate reactive loads, is not limited to resistive loads, and it is as good as a SmartMeter (1%). Even for badly distorted AC waveforms, it does the maths correctly. The device uses a 500KHz sigma-delta converter, so it has high resolution for

50Hz mains sine waves.

These usually have V, W, VA, PF, KWH and Hours

If you plug in a refrigerator and total the consumption for a week, it'll give you some idea what the "average" consumption is.

You would not plug in a kettle or an electric fire (on full power setting), as that's a bit harsh for the shunt resistor. There were early reports of the solder melting on the shunt, and it moving around inside the unit, when heavy currents were involved. But for a refrigerator (a lighter load), it'll do a fine job. As a rough limit, I would not run more than 1000W through mine. My electric fire is nominally

1500W on high, and it draws more current when it starts up cold.

For a LED light bulb, it'll show the Power Factor PF is around 0.6 or 0.7. Makes no different to your power bill, but that pisses off the power company. A few of the more expensive LED bulbs in the past, had a PF of around 0.9 . An incandescent is always 1.0 (means it is purely resistive). Your Active PFC IBM PC compatible, will have a PF close to 1.0 . Older PCs might be 0.6 or 0.7 and the heat pours out of the old (inefficient) ATX supplies.

It helps to have two of the meters, so one can be used to integrate over a month (as long as the power does not fail and ruin the experiment). The second one can be used for quick measurements of new equipment. Like if a Samsung TV says it draws 100W, you can check and see it's only 35W.

My PC right now, is idling at 38.4 watts. If I compress a file on all CPU cores, it measures 224 watts. If you run two of those 200W PCs, the room gets warm.

If I compare to my first PC (Pentium with 440BX chipset), the machine idled at 150W and was 153W flat out. Not exactly an inspirational design. That's one reason for not reusing really old PCs. And the Kill-O-Watt meter, is how you figure that out.

Paul

[Max Demian]

You might have had the goodness to provide more than a link to an image.

I know about them, and it appears that they cost about a tenner a pop.

To quote myself:

"I know there are plug in devices, but I think they are relatively expensive and only applicable to devices you plug in a 13A socket, not, for example cookers connected to a cooker point.

"I suppose you could buy one or two and swap them in and out, but the socket might be behind the fridge or for something you don't really want to unplug like a video recorder."