How to measure the power consumption of home electrical appliances

Sometimes it is useful to make sure that the home counter is working correctly and does not count anything superfluous. To do this, it is enough to measure the real power consumption of your home electrical appliances. Or maybe you have doubts about whether the heater or the water heater consumes too much, if it’s painfully impressive bills lately come for electricity.

One way or another, there are several ways to find out. The first way - using the meter itself to find out the consumption that it counts, the second - using a multimeter or current clamp to find out the consumption of the device? The third way is to measure the consumption of a specific device with a household wattmeter. Let's look at each method in detail, and let the reader choose the most convenient and suitable for themselves.

We know the consumption by the meter

Each meter, whether electronic or mechanical, has a real-time indication of kWh. On counters with a disk, this is the disk revolution, and on newer counters, the corresponding LED or icon blinks.

In short, it is necessary to turn off all appliances in the house and leave only the one whose power consumption needs to be measured to work. So, leave the device you are interested in working, and turn off the rest (even the refrigerator and light in all rooms), and then go to the counter.

If your counter is with a disk, then it will say on it, for example, that 1kWh is 1200 rpm of the disk. Therefore, you need to calculate how many turns the disk will make in 10 minutes. Then multiply the obtained number of revolutions by 6 - so we calculate the number of disk revolutions in 60 minutes (that is, in an hour). Divide this number by 1200, the resulting number will be the power of the device in kW.

If your counter has a blinking LED, then most likely it will say something like 1600 imp / (kW*h) - 1600 flashes of the LED per hour at a power consumption of 1 kW.

Count the number of blinks of the LED for 10 minutes, multiply the resulting number by 6 - so you get the number of blinks with the working device in an hour. Divide this number by 1600, the resulting number will be the power of the device in kW.

Having estimated how many hours a given device works per month, you can find out how many kilowatt-hours it is winding, simply by multiplying the power of this device (in kW) by this number of working hours. This can be done with any household electrical appliance.

We measure consumption with a multimeter or (and) current clamps

If your home arsenal has current clamp, then you will have to throw them on one of the wires of the two-wire wire connecting the device of interest to the outlet. Set the clamp to measure the approximate current range and measure.

If at hand along with current clamps there is also a multimeter, then at the same time you can measure the exact voltage in the network. Multiply the readings of current and voltage in the network - so you get the power of this device in watts.

When measuring with current clamps and a multimeter, be sure to follow the safety rules!

If there are no ticks at hand, but at least there is a multimeter with the ability to measure alternating current, then put it in the mode of measuring alternating current of a suitable range, and connect it in series between the outlet and one of the device's network inputs (observing safety precautions!). So you know the current consumed by the device. After that, it remains to multiply the magnitude of this current by the mains voltage. So you know the power of the device.

The next step is best to perform the power measurement procedure, which the meter wraps around (described in the previous paragraph).This will make it easier to understand whether the meter measures power correctly or not.

Measurement of power consumption by a household wattmeter

To measure the current power of network electrical appliances, a household wattmeter in the form of a network adapter is well suited. It simply displays the power on the display, and if necessary, counts kilowatt hours during use of the device.

Here you can check the readings of this meter with the power that is indicated on the consumer's nameplate. Further, it is desirable to verify the power with the meter according to the method described in the first paragraph of the article.