How to read a Digital Watt-Hour meter to get your present rate of power consumption.

Compared to the old analog watt-hour meter, reading KWH off a digital meter is easy, it just flashes the accumulated KWH on the display. But you can also read the present rate of power consumption (or watts) off the meter as well.

This is an Itron CENTRON C1SR meter:
- [ Ссылка ]

It was installed about 10 yrs. ago when the utility company swapped out the old analog meters. This meter does have an RF transmitter that sends the monthly KWH reading to the utility for billing purposes. This meter has been widely used across the US in the last 10 years.

To get the power reading, you can make use of the 3 flashing dots on the lower right corner of the display. One dot change (on or off) equals 1 watt-hour or 0.001 KWH. Simply time one (or more) dot changes and then do the math to convert to an hourly basis and then recall that 1 watt-hour = 1 watt for 1 hour.

Of course you can use a stop watch or similar to time the pulses, but I find it handy to use the built-in 10 second display flash, since it is always there. So if it take 1 minute for a dot to change, that would be 60 watt-hours per hour or your house is using 60 watts.

And if the dots are changing faster than the display flashes, count dot changes per display flash, so if you get 10 dot changes in a 10 second display cycle, then you are using 60 x 60 or 3600 watt-hours/hour or 3.6KW of power, you might see this rate if you have an electric range or clothes dryer running.

This isn't as handy as having a real-time, whole house power meter readout, but it costs nothing and it's ready to use any time. I'll demonstrate my home energy monitor in an upcoming video.

There are two small indicators that show on the bottom row that I have not found an explanation for. The read "DET" and "NET". If anyone knows what those indicate, please post that in the comments section below.

Here's a tear-down video that shows the insides of a similar type meter:
- [ Ссылка ]

This will be my 200th subscriber video featuring my utility company's digital watt-hour meter. My 100th subscriber video was about the LED streetlights the local utility put in:
- [ Ссылка ]
In any event, a big thank you goes out to all my subscribers. Without you these videos would not be possible.

Soundtrack:
Solar Flares by Silent Partner
[ Ссылка ]

свернуть