I want to monitor my domestic power consumption. Now there are any number of gadgets that will do this for a reasonable price - plug-in things that will tell you how much an individual appliance is using, or monitors that sit by your electricity meter. Being a cheapskate, though, can anyone tell me why I don't buy a cheap clamp meter from Maplin, which I can clamp round any wire in the place?
I suppose it will rely on certain assumptions, like fairly constant input voltage and fairly constant consumption from my bits and pieces, but as an energy saving measure, can anyone see any flaws in my plan? Do you think it will be sufficiently accurate?
2 comments:
Tricky, because you will have to separate the conductors - the clamp can be on the live or neutral, but not around both.
The L61AQ from Maplin works very well - I've used it on both resistive and inductive loads up to around 3kW.
Oh, duh. Didn't realize that. Good job I asked. Thanks!
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