Re: Measuring my electricity consumption.....

["John Andrews" <groups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

If you put a very large magnet on the wizzy wheel, you get free
electricity.

----- Original Message -----
From: "James Fidell" <james@xxxxxxx>
To: <ukha_d@xxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, February 09, 2005 6:36 PM
Subject: Re: [ukha_d] Measuring my electricity consumption.....


>
> Quoting darren_karp2001 (darren@xxxxxxx):
>
>> I've been on to http://pietje.com/stroom.asp and
would love the idea
>> of monitoring my usage. My lecky meter doesn't have a flashing
LED.
>> Is there any gizmo (X10 or similar) that I could use?
>
> I've been thinking about this, too.
>
> The newest digital meters I've seen (we had one installed in a house
we
> renovated a couple of years back, and there was one in a new house we
> rented whilst we were house-hunting) have had a little flashing LED.
> They also had a breaker built in, which makes for nice easy isolation
of
> the consumer unit if you need to play with it. I don't know if there's
> any way to persuade the electricity board to swap the meter though.
>
> Here we have an old "whizzy wheel" (at least, ours whizzes
:) meter.
> I've been wondering if it might not still be possible to use a similar
> method to count the number of times the black marker on the edge of
the
> wheel passes.  AFAIR, 166 and 2/3 rotations of this wheel is 1KWh.
>
> The other alternative that seems much more work is to put a webcam in
> front of the meter and take pictures of the read-out reguarly, running
> the results through an OCR system to get the digits.
>
> The obvious problem with both of these is that they need light to
work.
>
> Hunting around on the web very briefly leads me to these:
>
>  http://tinyurl.com/5fvpy
>  http://www.emetco.co.uk/Shop-2.asp
>
> which look promising.  Could they be wired in series with the existing
> meter, I wonder?
>
> James
>
>
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>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
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