On Nov 18, 10:48*am, Ant wrote:
On Nov 17, 10:42*am, Mike Clarke wrote:



therustyone wrote:
Does your house meter allow readings of
1/10 kwh so consumption could be checked by leaving the bulbs on for
several hours.

No need to take so long as that, you can check power consumption in just a
few minutes by watching the supply meter. The meter will have either a
rotating disk below the dials (if the old analogue type) or a flashing led
(if the newer digital type). Either way the front of the meter will be
marked to indicate how many rotations or flashes correspond to 1 KWh. On
our digital meter it's 1000 flashes per KWh, so if it flashed 1000 times
per hour (3.6 seconds per flash) you have a 1KW load and if the OP had only
his kitchen light with 2 x 11W and 1 x 8W CFLs (= 30W) connected it should
be 3.6 x 1000/30 = 120 seconds per flash. That's with a meter like ours,
other meters might have a different rate of flashes or turns but the
principle would be the same.

--
Mike Clarke

THanks for all the responses here...very interesting info. I'll find a
suitable time to power down the whole house ! and report back with my
findings by reading off the meter...

RIght...looks like this now makes sense ;-)

I powered the whole place down then turned on as many energy efficient
lights as I could find accessible and totalled the Wattage for them up
to 126W
I then took meter readings every 10 minutes and after 1 hour had used
very approximately 0.28 Kwh however my wife came home in the middle of
my test and I inadvertaintly, being a good husband...put the kettle
on...Doh!. Anyway, I reboiled after the readings to figure out it used
about 0.042Kwh (2.6Kw for 1 Min) ...subtrating that from my reading
gives 0.238 Kwh implying a draw of 240W which is double the ratings of
the sum of those bulbs but not as bad as my original readings
looked...I need to therefore run this for a longer period, and without
boiling the kettle ;-)

Incidently, My meter has 800 Imp/Kwh next to the flashing light and I
recorded about 29 seconds between flashes (eliminating the kettle
error)...that works out as 1 Hour / 29 Seconds = 124 FLashes.......
124 / 800 = 0.155 Kwh...so 155 Watts which is much closer to what
those bulbs added up to...


Ant.