Re: Electricity meter monitoring

["David Gumbrell" <david.gumbrell@xxxxxxxxx>]

You can get high current digital meters which you could put between
the
meter and the CU, not cheap, but real power monitoring (accounts for power
factor). Or there are low current (20A/32A) power meters with pulse output
that you could use for individual circuits. Search the archives, this has
come up a few times, and there is also a current (ouch) discussion on the
automatedhome Idratek forum and a potential bulk buy ...


On a related note, I started going round with a decent plug in meter to try
and understand the 600W apparent base load. I was surprised at how many non
unity power factor devices I have - this would make the readings from
purely
current sensing devices inaccurate.

Cheers

David

On 23/01/2008, Steve Hetherington <sjhha@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>   I'm using the rfxcom units to measure electricity and gas usage. The
> electricity monitor uses a clamp-on sensor and the gas a reflective
> detector. If you don't fancy the clamp electricity monitor, the
optical
> one I use for gas might work for the 'spinning wheel' black mark. More
> information at www.rfxcom.com
>
> Regards,
>
> Steve H.
>
> James Fidell wrote:
> > I can find a few web pages discussing monitoring of a
"spinning wheel"
> > electricity meter and logging to a pc, but they generally seem to
be for
> > (US-style?) meters in clear cases rather than black shrouded ones
such
> > as my own and rely on shining some sort of light through an index
hole
> > in the wheel from above or below, which obviously isn't going to
work
> > for me unless i fancy taking a dremel to the meter case, which I
can't
> > see the electricity-supplier finding too amusing.
> >
> > Has anyone successfully built something that (say) counts the
> > revolutions of the wheel using the black mark on the edge and
grabbed
> > the data on a PC?
> >
> > (My fallback solution is to take the meter tails and divert them
through
> > a second digital meter with a pulsed output, but as I have no way
to
> > disconnect the mains at that point other than by disconnecting
the
> > supplier-side fuses, I'm not desperately keen on that.)
> >
> > James
> >
>
>
>


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