Electricity Experiments

Ever calculate how much electricity used by your home appliances and other electric-power equipment at your home? You can find the total usage of your home electricity from your monthly electric bill, but you may want to measure the energy used by each electric-powered items at your home, then how to do the measurement?

No matter what reason you want to measure the energy used by an electric-powered item at your home, basically there are three ways to measure it:

1. Use a simple watt-hour meter

You can use a simple watt-hour meter, which can be purchased at your local store. Just plug-in the device to the watt-hour meter and then plug the meter into the supply point. When the device is drawing current, the watt-hour meter will read the usage. This little device will tell you how much electricity uses at a given moment and over an extended period of time. This simple watt-hour meter is especially useful for finding the amount of electricity usage, measured in kWh for devices that don’t run constantly, like window unit air conditioners and refrigerators.

2. Install a whole-house meter

If you like to monitor whole house energy uses at any give moment, or how much you have used so far for the month, then you might want to consider an installation of a whole-house meter. The meter is similar to the electric meter at your home, but it has extra features that enable you to measure the electricity usage at a selected period of time. Once you press the reset button, the meter reading will be reset to zero, it will record the electricity usage until you stop it. This whole-house meter is very useful for you to monitor monthly electricity usage, which you can use to compare with the figure stated in your electric bill and make sure you are not overcharged.

3. Look at the electric meter

If you don’t want to spend money to buy watt-hour meter or install a whole-house meter, you still can measure the electricity using at a give moment. You just need to make use of your home electric meter.

This is how it can be done:

First, turn off the device you want to measure. In order to accurately measure the electricity usage of the device, you have to turn off the air conditioner and refrigerator because they will affect the reading if they kick in while you are making the measurement. Then, go to your electric meter and measure with a stopwatch on how long it takes for the disc to spin one round. Then, turn on the device you want to measure and go back to your electric meter to measure how much time it takes to spin one round.

Once you have the reading, you are ready to do the calculation. Look on the electric meter find something printed like “kh X.X”, where “X.X” is some number, normally is 7.2. This figure is called Kh factor.

The formula for calculation is: 3.6 x Kh fator / number of seconds = kW

Just plug-in the measurement and the Kh factor into the formula to get the electric usage of the device for a given time. For example, the Kh factor is 7.2. It took 60 seconds for the disc of the electric meter to spin when the device is turned off. And it took 40 second for the disc to spin when the device is turned on. Your first check when device is off showed you were using (3.6×7.2)/60 = 432 watts. With the device turned on, the usage is (3.6×7.2)/40 = 648 watts. By subtracting the 2 figures, you will get 216 watts, which is the power usage of the device selected for power usage measurement.

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