In article , fred scribeth thus
In article , tony sayer
writes

I've just been sent one from EON for another location but it's been very
interesting looking at the power consumed here some of which is used in
an office outside and workshop and the house but there is an odd 17
watts there with everything tuned off apart from a lighting circuit and
everything is switched off on that too. But still the 17 watt load!

However if you switch the main incomer off then the reading on the unit
does drop to zero.

Interesting to see just how much all that IT and phone PC and the other
bits and bobs take up;!. Theres gonna be a cull of power consuming
devices left on all 24 hours here before long..

Please don't, walk out re-climb some aerial, go for a a drive, a walk,
anything but please don't lose any sleep over those 17W ;-/

It wasn't particularly that odd amount, I was more interested and
curious as to -what- was pulling that!.

As to the rest thats in train, as it were..

--
Tony Sayer

Johny B Good wrote:


A plug in energy monitor will give you a chance to check the weekly total
consumption of things like fridges / freezers (any white goods items that
are run on an intermittent weekly basis).

.... this isn't so easy for appliances that are built-in


Prioritise: make sure there isn't a 'phantom load', make sure the meter's
not over-reading

It's a few years since I last tried to work out what causes base load here.
The puzzles are

- central heating system: the boiler unit has a segment timer on
the front driven by an internal electric motor; it's normally
bypassed but still driven. There's an external electronic
programmer as well; sometimes I have the latter turn heating
on for some hours but have the segment timer in use too so
that the heating is on, say, for every third 15 minute period
over those hours. The boiler also of course has its main
PCB and - when heating is on - the pumps. I don't imagine it
uses much, but it's on all the time...

Its supply is via a fused spur unit.


- alarm system - half a dozen PIRs, 2 smoke detectors, 2 control
panel/keypads with illuminated displays, active siren boxes on
two sides of the house with tell-tale LED flashes... all on a
wired system.

And, like the boiler, no simple way to intercept the mains supply
to measure it. I have wondered if anyone makes a plug that one
could use on a flying lead to insert into the spur's fuse holder
to break out a connection?


- halogen hob; it's connected via T&E to a kitchen oven supply; if
I bought the sort of energy monitor that's meant to be clipped
to meter tails could I get a reading by clipping that around the
T&E?


- ovens ... timer is on all the time; surely this uses hardly any
power, but it's quite old technology so maybe it wastes more
than I'd expect. ISTR the supply is from a 13A socket but it's
hidden behind kitchen units.


- PIR-controlled outside light, permanently wired into a lighting
circuit... though there's an isolator switch... Can one use the
sort of plug-in energy monitor that's meant to be plugged into a
13 A socket to measure power used by a light - there must be a
L & N running through the isolator to the light so presumably I
could divert them to a 13A socket, plug in the monitor & connect
flex from a 13A plug to the outward part of the light's supply?


- bell transformer, meant to be illuminating a bell-push, but I
think the bulb's blown... so presumably the transformer uses
nothing at all, or a negligible amount?

--
Jeremy C B Nicoll - my opinions are my own.

Email sent to my from-address will be deleted. Instead, please reply
to replacing "aaa" by "284".

On 23/09/2014 21:56, tony sayer wrote:

But still the 17 watt load!


Have you left the loft light on?
Have you got a TV distribution amp wired to your lighting circuit in the
loft?

The accuracy of measurement is probably not specified for a reading that
low so 17W may just be the figure it gives if it sees just a mains
voltage with near zero current. I doubt if it is much better than +/-5%
at 1KW.


--
mailto: news {at} admac {dot] myzen {dot} co {dot} uk

On Tue, 23 Sep 2014 12:53:04 +0100, News
wrote:

In message 2014092312283355171-test@rawlinson456com, Mark Rawlinson
writes

I forgot something significant - halogen lighting. There are 12 50W
lights in the kitchen and eight in two bathrooms. If they are all on
this is 1.1kW.

Such "Downlighters" are the spawn of the Devil. Sometime in the past,
a **** of a "Lighting Designer" (no doubt calling himself a fashion
designer) in the employ of a lighting accessories manufacturer,
decided the mis appropriation of these lamps into a stylish table lamp
in an exercise of "Fashion over Function" would be a "Jolly good
wheeze" and set the ball rolling which eventually led to the concept
of ceiling downlighter luminaries we loathe today.

These spot lighting lamps did have a legitimate use to begin with
which was, essentially, to provide an unobtrusive source of spot
illumination in retail stores for such things as shop window and
counter displays of the "Goods on Show".

The lamp manufacturers were only too happy to supply the extra demand
opened up by this market demographic (basically pretentious gits with
more money than sense).


Yes, I keep remembering various things. We have five chandeliers (!) in
this house, all of which use traditional candle bulbs. Luckily, we
rarely use them, as Wifey prefers various flavours of table lamps, most
of which are now fitted with modern low energy bulbs.

This house was a B&B years ago, and various toilets have extractor fans
fitted, which come on with the ceiling light, but continue running after
the light is switched off. I did try to disconnect one yesterday, but
there are too many wires. I disconnected two red ones, but that just
made it click, and the motor pulsed so I bottled out, reconnected the
two red wires and left it running :-)

I read here a while ago that leaving a shaver plugged in to the bathroom
light, as I did, makes the transformer consume power, so now I unplug
that daily. Every little helps ...

Hmn, I thought I'd already mentioned that you leave the small fry
alone when you have much bigger fish to fry.

Even an inneficient shaver transformer is unlikely to waste more than
a couple of watts (a good quality mains transformer can get the
standby loss down to less than 1/4 watt - a cheap chinese one _might_
be wasting as much as 3 watts in this standby state).

Once you're certain the meter is working properly, you need to look
for hidden phantom loads and monitor the obvious heavy loads with an
energy consumption monitor (digital plug in wattmeter) for a suitable
period of time (24 hour or weekly period) making use of the WH counter
feature such meters possess.

You can work out how much each watt of 24/7 standby power costs per
year (hint: it's 8.67 units per watt). A few years ago, each such watt
of standby power approximated a pound per year on the electricity
bill. I'm sure that must be a litlle bit more by now but you can
easily work out how much 8.67 units worth will cost you by checking
the price per unit on your bill.

Comparing your electric consumption against others, it seems to me
that you could have a continuous background consumption averaging
around the 500 watt mark. Switching off an unused shaver transformer
along with half a dozen phone charger wallwarts is hardly going to
make a dent in your current level of electric consumption.

From the various descriptions of your house wiring, it seems you have
a "Rat's Nest" wiring layout fed from 4 seperate fuse boxes (Consumer
Units). I rather suspect it may not conform to the regulations.

When we moved into our current property over thirty years ago (6 bed
victorian semi on 3 floors and a basement), the Building society held
a thousand pounds back against having the lighting wiring re-done to
replace the VIR in conduit wiring.

With the help of one of the XYL's uncles who was a retired
electrician in his seventies by then, I completely rewired the
lighting, splitting it between two 6A fuses in the CU. However, the
wiring to the 13A sockets was in a bit of a shambles with two of the
three 30A fuses serving a couple of ring mains, only one of which was
truly a ring main, albeit with one section of the 'cabling' run
comprising a heavy duty rubber insulated 3 core flex on the second
floor.

The other 'ring main' was wired to about half the ground floor
sockets and half the first floor sockets with the odd spur wired
socket thrown in for further confusion. I think the third 30A fuse
served a random collection of sockets between the ground and first
floors providing for yet more confusion with the remaining 15 fuse
serving the immersion heater as per the regs.

When the contractors started the grant aided work to build a kitchen
extension and free up the very pokey kitchen space for use as a
downstairs loo and shower room, I took the opportunity to completely
rewire the sockets as proper ring main supplies, one per floor.

The top floor ring main only needed that one section of rubber
insulated cable run replacing with 2.5mm FT&E to bring that up to spec
which, by dropping an extension lead from a 2nd floor socket to power
the TV set and an electric kettle on the ground floor, allowed me to
pull the fuses on the rest of the socket wiring to allow me to recover
the redundent 2.5mm FT&E cable runs for reassembly into a ring main
for each of the ground and first floors (the contractors wired in
another 2 way Wylex fuse box for the kitchen ring main and the cooker
point).

I finally reached a point where I had a collection of various lengths
of 2.5mm FT&E from which to select for each socket to socket run in my
revamped ring main layout. I started by selecting the shortest lengths
first, working through to the longer lengths to minimise the need to
_actually_buy_ new cable.

Apart from renewing that section in the 2nd floor ring main, I think
I managed to reassemble the ground and first floor ring mains using
the recovered cable lengths (or else was just shy on a single run).
Thanks to my dad gifting me a few lengths of 2.5m FT&E he had
cluttering up his garage, the only cable I'd had to spend real money
on was a couple of 100metre drums of 1.5mm FT&E for the lighting
wiring.

When I was finished, I was able to easily label the fuse cover to
identify what was what in the new configuration making the act of
pulling a fuse less of a lottery as to what sockets would go dead and
which would stay live.

The basement lighting was fed from the upstairs lighting fuse (the
ground floor had a whole fuse to itself) and I mounted 3 seperate
single gang 13A sockets on the CU baseboard, one per ring main to
provide power in the basement itself.

We kept a chest freezer in the basement at that time and it seemed a
good idea to have some redundency of supply options in the event of a
protracted problem on any one ring main - it was just a matter of
transferring the freezer plug over to one of the other sockets should
the mains fail on the one it happened to be plugged into. Also, the
basement acted as a workshop cum radio shack so it seemed only prudent
to make sure I could run any power tools required to effect repairs
regardless of any one ring main developing a protracted fault.

The end result of all this rewiring was that instead of getting a
certificate of electrical worthiness for the lighting wiring alone to
show the BS, I was able to get one for the whole of the house wiring
(and sleep more soundly in my bed at night knowing that the wiring was
as safe as it possibly could be - if a job is worth doing well, it's
worth doing properly).

In the thirty years since, we've never had a fuse blow even with the
second floor ring main fuse having a 15A fuse bridge plugged in place
of the 30A fuse bridge ever since our daughter left home nearly a
decade ago to get married leaving just our youngest son as sole
occupant of the second floor.The smaller fuse value provides that
little bit of extra safety margin against faults in the permanent
wiring without compromising the reliability of the supply.

It seems there's a risk you might be drawn into a major revamp of
your mains wiring once you start taking a closer look at it. I was
lucky in regard of the 13A socket wiring in that all, bar that section
in the top floor ring main, had been wired in 2.5mm FT&E, requiring
simply a rejigging of the topology to make it more managable and to
assure everything was properly wired up in accordance to the regs.

Whatever happens, I wish you luck in tracking down the cause of your
seemingly high electricity consumption. It doesn't appear to be a
particularly straight forward exercise from what you've described of
your wiring.
--
J B Good

On Tue, 23 Sep 2014 16:55:29 +0100, Andy Burns
wrote:

John Rumm wrote:

there are two downstairs lighting circuits. Both had
all the lights off, yet between them they draw 400mA.

Perhaps I ought to
measure the leakage through the touch dimmers.

Surely you'd notice 96W warming up a few dimmer switches if it was
happening ?

+1

If there's any one thing drawing excess standby power, you'd expect
to see an abnormally elevated temperature in the case of compact items
such as wall warts and dimmer switches. It might be worth using a
cheap IR thermometer to sniff out the suspects.
--
J B Good

On Tue, 23 Sep 2014 12:34:26 +0100, News
wrote:

In message , John
Rumm writes
So I slapped a clamp meter round one of the meter tails, and switched
off various bits to see what showed up...

Interesting. So, if I am reading these figures correctly, that is a
total draw of 6.07 amps. What I don't know, is how to convert that to
KWph. In other words, if you used exactly 6.07 amps for one hour, how
many units of electricity would that be?

All that could be said about that, assuming an actual rms voltage of
240v (as opposed to the 'notional' 230v rms ac value) is it
corresponds to a KVA value of 1.457 which, for a unity power factor,
works out at just under 1 1/2 units of electricity consumed in one
hour. If the power factor is less than unity, say 67%, this would
represent just under 1 unit.

A 'Unit' of electricity is actually a quantity of energy expressed as
a KiloWatt Hour (KWH). A single unit of electrical consumption
registered by the supplier's meter could be the result of 250W for 4
hours, 500W for 2 hours, 1KW for i hou, 2KW for half an hour or 3KW
for 20 minutes. A unit is simply the product of wattage and time based
on the KW and Hour units.

For purely resistive loads like tungsten filament lamps, steam irons,
toasters, electric kettles and electric ovens without fan assist, the
power consumed is the simple product of the rms voltage and current
measurements taken by independant meters. It gets a little more
involved once you introduce reactive components (the inductor used in
an old fashioned fluorescent light fitting as a ballast to limit the
discharge current of the tube which for fittings rated above the 20W
minimum allowed to omit the PFC capacitor entirely are only partially
corrected by the Power Factor Correction capacitor, usually to a 90%
PF value from an uncorrect PF figure of 50% or less.

You might want to take a look at the wiki article on Power Factor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_factor if you hanker after more
detail.
--
J B Good

On Tue, 23 Sep 2014 13:33:03 +0100, Chris J Dixon
wrote:

Tim Streater wrote:

I bought one of these:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B000Q7PJGW/

in 2009 - very useful for seeing what juice is going through a
particular socket if you want to measure e.g. a fridge/freezer or a
telly. It can give you instantaneous measurements and average over some
period but doesn't store any data.

Well, as long as the supply isn't interrupted you can get total
hours elapsed and total kW used.

Chris

Maplin sell that model (L61AQ) for a quid more. However, they're
still selling the equally as good N67FU monitor for £9.99

A quick look at CPC reveals the energenie (PL13062) for £10.05 +VAT
(£12.06), unfortunately as per usual, no great detail on its
specifications.


As it happens, I own an L61AQ (Europeanised Kill-A-Watt) along with a
couple of the N67FU meters which all, according to my trusty Metrawatt
analogue watt meter are pretty accurately calibrated for most loads in
the 1 to 3750 and 3120W upper limit ranges considering the
limitations of digital metering.

I've just noticed that Maplin still erroneously list the power
consumption of the L61AQ as 20W (10W for the yank version) rather than
the more correct figure of 20VA on the Amazon site (the actual
consumption being in the region of half a watt for both types).
--
J B Good

On Tue, 23 Sep 2014 13:45:36 +0100, "Richard"
wrote:

"Tim Streater" wrote in message
. ..

In article , News
wrote:

In message o.uk, Dave
Liquorice writes
On Mon, 22 Sep 2014 13:23:19 +0100, News wrote:

when we've run out of oil.

I keep a close eye on the oil, weekly sight glass reading and
extrapolate when it's likely to run out.

Indeed. We use a Watchman which, despite a few negative comments here,
works rather well.

Same here.

Right. Progress. Pictures of our fuse boxes here :

http://www.binnsroad.co.uk/misc/meter1/index.html

Looks a bit like our under-stairs cupboard. :-)

Even more progress. Have found the monitor which E.on sent me um, eons
ago. One clamp to go around the main supply cable. Will that be the
thick red cable to the left of the meter, in the bottom picture?

Can you figure out where the supply enters? I guess it then goes to the
meter.

Eon sent us one too, when we were with them. Useful to have on the desk
next to me.

I bought one of these:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B000Q7PJGW/

in 2009 - very useful for seeing what juice is going through a
particular socket if you want to measure e.g. a fridge/freezer or a
telly. It can give you instantaneous measurements and average over some
period but doesn't store any data.

I have one of these:
http://www.headingpower.com/p-302-wa...l-1506210.aspx
Quite handy.

A look at pages 10 and 11 of the user guide shows an accuracy of
+/-5% (ok, fair enough but) +/- 10W on a wattage range of 0 to 4416
watts?

Is it really limited to only being able to measure to within plus or
minus 10 watts?

--
J B Good

On Wed, 24 Sep 2014 03:32:38 +0100, Johny B Good wrote:

Such "Downlighters" are the spawn of the Devil. Sometime in the past,
a **** of a "Lighting Designer" (no doubt calling himself a fashion
designer) in the employ of a lighting accessories manufacturer, decided
the mis appropriation of these lamps into a stylish table lamp in an
exercise of "Fashion over Function" would be a "Jolly good wheeze" and
set the ball rolling which eventually led to the concept of ceiling
downlighter luminaries we loathe today.

These spot lighting lamps did have a legitimate use to begin with
which was, essentially, to provide an unobtrusive source of spot
illumination in retail stores for such things as shop window and counter
displays of the "Goods on Show".

The lamp manufacturers were only too happy to supply the extra demand
opened up by this market demographic (basically pretentious gits with
more money than sense).

We should all go back to lovely flouro strip lights everywhere,
especially in the living room, eh?

Back to basics. Before I start trying to see what is using too much
power, what would you expect ordinary consumption to be, during the day
at this time of year?

No heating, cooking, washing machine, dishwasher, kettle etc. Just
ordinary stuff like various wall warts, a PC or two, perhaps a light or
two on, fridges/freezers running etc. In other words, what would you
reasonably expect an energy monitor to show, in the middle of a
reasonably warm, bright day?
--
Graeme

News wrote:

what would you expect ordinary consumption to be, during the day
at this time of year?

Mine is under 150W

No heating, cooking, washing machine, dishwasher, kettle etc. Just
ordinary stuff like various wall warts, a PC or two, perhaps a light or
two on, fridges/freezers running etc.

Biggest variable is the fridge/freezer, mine tends to kick in on a 2:1
duty cycle.

In message , Andy
Burns writes
News wrote:

what would you expect ordinary consumption to be, during the day
at this time of year?

Mine is under 150W

Having only installed my monitor yesterday, I have little history, but,
each time I glance at it, the figure is 4-500W.
--
Graeme

On 24/09/2014 10:02, News wrote:

Having only installed my monitor yesterday, I have little history, but,
each time I glance at it, the figure is 4-500W.

That's around our 'background' consumption but our annual consumption is
~6000 units so it looks as though you have something that you (or the
shop!?) regularly(?) turn on for long periods with a fairly high
consumption or for shorter, but significant periods, with very high
consumption.

--
F

"Johny B Good" wrote in message
...

On Tue, 23 Sep 2014 13:45:36 +0100, "Richard"
wrote:

"Tim Streater" wrote in message
...

In article , News
wrote:

In message o.uk,
Dave
Liquorice writes
On Mon, 22 Sep 2014 13:23:19 +0100, News wrote:

when we've run out of oil.

I keep a close eye on the oil, weekly sight glass reading and
extrapolate when it's likely to run out.

Indeed. We use a Watchman which, despite a few negative comments here,
works rather well.

Same here.

Right. Progress. Pictures of our fuse boxes here :

http://www.binnsroad.co.uk/misc/meter1/index.html

Looks a bit like our under-stairs cupboard. :-)

Even more progress. Have found the monitor which E.on sent me um, eons
ago. One clamp to go around the main supply cable. Will that be the
thick red cable to the left of the meter, in the bottom picture?

Can you figure out where the supply enters? I guess it then goes to the
meter.

Eon sent us one too, when we were with them. Useful to have on the desk
next to me.

I bought one of these:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B000Q7PJGW/

in 2009 - very useful for seeing what juice is going through a
particular socket if you want to measure e.g. a fridge/freezer or a
telly. It can give you instantaneous measurements and average over some
period but doesn't store any data.

I have one of these:
http://www.headingpower.com/p-302-wa...l-1506210.aspx
Quite handy.

A look at pages 10 and 11 of the user guide shows an accuracy of
+/-5% (ok, fair enough but) +/- 10W on a wattage range of 0 to 4416
watts?

Is it really limited to only being able to measure to within plus or
minus 10 watts?

TBH, I haven't bothered to check the absolute accuracy. I got it so that I
could have an estimate of the consumption for various electrical items. I
really am not that concerned whether an appliance consumes 100W or 110W as
that 10W is not going to bankrupt me.
YMMV

On Wed, 24 Sep 2014 09:00:24 +0100, News wrote:

Back to basics. Before I start trying to see what is using too much
power, what would you expect ordinary consumption to be, during the day
at this time of year?

750 W on our monitor ATM. That is about normal. 11 CFLs and 1 5'
florry, two PC and monitors, associated modems, switches, server,
NAS's, VOIP kit, CH controls (two RF stats, two programmers).

If you get a monitor that has a data out you can produce things like
this:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/allsorts-60/3891740435

--
Cheers
Dave.

News wrote:

Having only installed my monitor yesterday, I have little history, but,
each time I glance at it, the figure is 4-500W.

That's under half of what would account for your 9000+ units, but it
might point to the excess happening overnight, rather than during the day.

In message , News
writes

Back to basics. Before I start trying to see what is using too much
power, what would you expect ordinary consumption to be, during the day
at this time of year?

No heating, cooking, washing machine, dishwasher, kettle etc. Just
ordinary stuff like various wall warts, a PC or two, perhaps a light or
two on, fridges/freezers running etc. In other words, what would you
reasonably expect an energy monitor to show, in the middle of a
reasonably warm, bright day?

This morning, for the last couple of hours it has been fluctuating
around 500W.

4 people in the house.

A couple of laptops on, a PC for most of that time. a server (about 40w
idling) , various wallwarts for router, VDSL modem, wifi AP, a couple of
network switches and the normal other stuff scattered about. Tropical
fishtank, A fridge and small and large freezer and probably a couple of
lights on somewhere.

We also have a similar size elec consumption, so independently of this
thread I have been having another go at looking at where ours has been
going. We do have a lot of occupation of the house though. 2 adults, 2
kids, but we home educate, so often 3 of us a round in the daytime as
well.
--
Chris French

On 24/09/2014 03:36, Johny B Good wrote:
On Tue, 23 Sep 2014 16:55:29 +0100, Andy Burns
wrote:

John Rumm wrote:

there are two downstairs lighting circuits. Both had
all the lights off, yet between them they draw 400mA.

Perhaps I ought to
measure the leakage through the touch dimmers.

Surely you'd notice 96W warming up a few dimmer switches if it was
happening ?

+1

If there's any one thing drawing excess standby power, you'd expect
to see an abnormally elevated temperature in the case of compact items
such as wall warts and dimmer switches. It might be worth using a
cheap IR thermometer to sniff out the suspects.

Keep in mind this is a lighting circuit (or more to the point a pair of
them), and all the lights on the circuit were off at the time of
testing. I have also eliminated the PIR and the dimmers from the suspect
list. I will check the charging current on some of the emergency lights
next...




--
Cheers,

John.

/================================================== ===============\
| Internode Ltd - http://www.internode.co.uk |
|-----------------------------------------------------------------|
| John Rumm - john(at)internode(dot)co(dot)uk |
\================================================= ================/

In message , alan_m
writes

Link to a meter on Amazon Uk site
http://tinyurl.com/kra9oxx

Looks useful. Thank you.
--
Graeme

In message o.uk, Dave
Liquorice writes

If you get a monitor that has a data out you can produce things like
this:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/allsorts-60/3891740435

Brilliant. My monitor does exactly that - or at least it would, if I
could get the poxy PC to see the poxy monitor ...

Meanwhile, having turned off almost everything, I got down to 84w usage.
A couple of phones and the router.

Turning stuff back on was interesting. Difficult to be exact because I
don't know when things like freezers are coming on or off, but :

2 x laptop chargers 140w
5 x fluorescent tubes 215w (2', 40w each)
fridge and fridge freezer 275w (but I think only one was running)
Son's PC 40w
My PC 240w (scary)

I really need to do this with everyone else out of the house. What is
slightly worrying is that it seems to be obvious that this usage is us
specific rather than building specific. In other words, if we moved
from this Victorian pile to a modern, insulated 2 bed bungalow and took
our current habits with us, electricity consumption would not change.

P.S. Good to know that this thread is making others check their usage
and habits :-)
--
Graeme

News wrote:

5 x fluorescent tubes 215w (2', 40w each)

If those are the tubes that you said are on all the time, there's 5 units a
day gone. Just 40W, for 24 hours, is a unit.

--
Jeremy C B Nicoll - my opinions are my own.

Email sent to my from-address will be deleted. Instead, please reply
to replacing "aaa" by "284".

In message id, Jeremy
Nicoll - news posts writes
News wrote:

5 x fluorescent tubes 215w (2', 40w each)

If those are the tubes that you said are on all the time, there's 5 units a
day gone. Just 40W, for 24 hours, is a unit.

Indeed. Two are on one switch, and three on another. Starting last
night, the three were off! These are tubes in the kitchen, and they
really do need to be on during the day. The kitchen is quite large, but
poorly lit. Time to think about alternative lighting, I think.
--
Graeme

In message , Tim Streater
writes
In article , News
wrote:

In message o.uk,
Dave Liquorice writes

If you get a monitor that has a data out you can produce things like
this:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/allsorts-60/3891740435

Brilliant. My monitor does exactly that - or at least it would, if I
could get the poxy PC to see the poxy monitor ...
Meanwhile, having turned off almost everything, I got down to 84w
usage. A couple of phones and the router.
Turning stuff back on was interesting. Difficult to be exact
because I don't know when things like freezers are coming on or off,
but :
2 x laptop chargers 140w

Continuous or just when charging? Room for improvement here.

Normally they seem to be only when charging-certainly that's what ours
do.



fridge and fridge freezer 275w (but I think only one was running)

Is one of them old? Or both, possibly? May be worth re-investing.

FWIW.

We've a fairly old about (20 years?) under counter freezer that draws
100W when running. Not sure what the new (about a year or so) fridge
does


Son's PC 40w

This is OK.

My PC 240w (scary)

Agreed :-)

Sounds like and old Pentium 4 :-)

Yeah, unless it's a gaming rig, no need for it to anything like that. I
think the main PC here draws something like 100 -120W max?
--
Chris French

On Wed, 24 Sep 2014 07:52:25 +0000 (UTC), Adrian
wrote:

On Wed, 24 Sep 2014 03:32:38 +0100, Johny B Good wrote:

Such "Downlighters" are the spawn of the Devil. Sometime in the past,
a **** of a "Lighting Designer" (no doubt calling himself a fashion
designer) in the employ of a lighting accessories manufacturer, decided
the mis appropriation of these lamps into a stylish table lamp in an
exercise of "Fashion over Function" would be a "Jolly good wheeze" and
set the ball rolling which eventually led to the concept of ceiling
downlighter luminaries we loathe today.

These spot lighting lamps did have a legitimate use to begin with
which was, essentially, to provide an unobtrusive source of spot
illumination in retail stores for such things as shop window and counter
displays of the "Goods on Show".

The lamp manufacturers were only too happy to supply the extra demand
opened up by this market demographic (basically pretentious gits with
more money than sense).

We should all go back to lovely flouro strip lights everywhere,
especially in the living room, eh?

I wasn't suggesting going to that extreme as you know full well,
although fluorescent tubes have been available in circular form for
just such "Not out of place in the Living Room" usage for the past 4
decades or so. Now we repeat the same exercise using small, highly
loaded spiral tubes, cunningly disguised as incandescent bulbs.

My message was simply, "For sanity's sake, _don't_ fit ceiling
downlighters _anywhere_ in a domestic property!"
--
J B Good

On Wed, 24 Sep 2014 10:33:37 +0100, "Richard"
wrote:

"Johny B Good" wrote in message
.. .

On Tue, 23 Sep 2014 13:45:36 +0100, "Richard"
wrote:

"Tim Streater" wrote in message
t...

In article , News
wrote:

In message o.uk,
Dave
Liquorice writes
On Mon, 22 Sep 2014 13:23:19 +0100, News wrote:

when we've run out of oil.

I keep a close eye on the oil, weekly sight glass reading and
extrapolate when it's likely to run out.

Indeed. We use a Watchman which, despite a few negative comments here,
works rather well.

Same here.

Right. Progress. Pictures of our fuse boxes here :

http://www.binnsroad.co.uk/misc/meter1/index.html

Looks a bit like our under-stairs cupboard. :-)

Even more progress. Have found the monitor which E.on sent me um, eons
ago. One clamp to go around the main supply cable. Will that be the
thick red cable to the left of the meter, in the bottom picture?

Can you figure out where the supply enters? I guess it then goes to the
meter.

Eon sent us one too, when we were with them. Useful to have on the desk
next to me.

I bought one of these:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B000Q7PJGW/

in 2009 - very useful for seeing what juice is going through a
particular socket if you want to measure e.g. a fridge/freezer or a
telly. It can give you instantaneous measurements and average over some
period but doesn't store any data.

I have one of these:
http://www.headingpower.com/p-302-wa...l-1506210.aspx
Quite handy.

A look at pages 10 and 11 of the user guide shows an accuracy of
+/-5% (ok, fair enough but) +/- 10W on a wattage range of 0 to 4416
watts?

Is it really limited to only being able to measure to within plus or
minus 10 watts?

TBH, I haven't bothered to check the absolute accuracy. I got it so that I
could have an estimate of the consumption for various electrical items. I
really am not that concerned whether an appliance consumes 100W or 110W as
that 10W is not going to bankrupt me.
YMMV

Well, it certainly did that with a couple of £8.99 digital "Power"
Meters my dad bought in Aldi about a decade back. The experience of
"The 'cheap digital watt meter" as demonstrated by these two examples
rather soured my view of the more expensive 'cheap' digital wattmeters
that were available at the time such as the classic "Kill-A-Watt"(tm)
and its European variants in popular use by the home energy brigade (a
group largely dominated by the Yanks).

This cheap Aldi meter (model #DEM1379 for the more curious) seemed to
work more like a simple VA meter, especially for loads less than 100W
varying by up to +/- 10W on some 10 to 20 watt electronic loads (as
measured with a real wattmeter - the MetraWatt model I've mentioned
elsewhere).

In short, it was fekin' useless for checking the stuff I wanted to
check (wallwarts, PCs and similar type loads). Even treating its
readings as VA measurements didn't seem to account for its
unpredictable behaviour.

I guess they'd rather skimped on the quality of the ADC chips and the
processor that was supposed to calculate each product of voltage and
current sample taken at a fast enough sampling rate to sum the results
to generate a true(ish) rms value of the power consumed by the load.

It just disturbs me a little to see mention of a +/- 10W accuracy for
a current(?) model of digital watt meter. That suggests it might
simply be a revamped DEM1379 (which, btw, also used a couple of AG13
button cells to provide backup power to maintain the units consumed
log).

You can test with a table lamp using various CFLs or LED and Tungsten
filament lamps to check its behaviour at the lower power levels with a
mix of purely resistive and reactive loads. If the meter is better
than the +/-10W accuracy implied, you can trust it to give meaningful
readings when checking the power consumption of your IT kit otherwise,
restrict it to toasters and kettles and buy a better one to measure
the "Tricky Loads".

From personal experience, the only models of digital watt meter I'd
care to recommend are the L61AQ[1] and the N67FU models sold by Maplin
for a penny or two shy of 20 and 10 quid respectively. The N67FU,
unlike the L61AQ (a Europeanised Kill-A-Watt) can show sub watt
figures. Above the 1W mark, they both display to a tenth of a watt.
The accuracy is about the same for both[2] so I'd recommend the
cheaper N67FU as the 'Best Value' buy.

[1] Amazon are selling the same meter (another model name) for a quid
cheaper - personally, I won't use Amazon, not just for the fact that
they're after world domination but mostly on account of their google
sponsored ads links which will take you, 99 times out of a 100, to a
page of items which have absolutely **** all to do with your search
(fekin' timewasters!).

[2] Excluding test labs, I doubt there's more than a handul of people
in the whole of the UK who can check these meters against a real
wattmeter so you can trust me on this. :-)
--
J B Good

On Wed, 24 Sep 2014 14:47:48 +0100, Chris French wrote:

2 x laptop chargers 140w

Presumably chargeing their attached laptops, not alot you can do
about that. Modern switched mode power supplys/chargers are pretty
effcient.

fridge and fridge freezer 275w (but I think only one was running)

Is one of them old? Or both, possibly? May be worth re-investing.

We've a fairly old about (20 years?) under counter freezer that draws
100W when running. Not sure what the new (about a year or so) fridge
does

With thse devices it's not so much the amount they draw, the laws pf
physics dictate that to shift X amount of heat from A to B you need Y
amount of input power. How often the heat pump needs to run to keep
the inside cold is what matters, and old relatively poorly insulated
device will run more often than a modern AAAdouble plus highly
insulated one.

My PC 240w (scary)

Agreed :-)

Sounds like and old Pentium 4 :-)

Or a 1 GHz single core Athlon that I'm using, though I think it's
only about 150W. It probably does chomp through 2 to 3 units/day
though. One day I'll change it, *IF* I get a 120 W saving (ie 180 W
down to 60 W) that would be £80/year, payback in 3 years ish. Hmmm...

240 W for 16 hours (0800 to 0000) is 4.3 units.

--
Cheers
Dave.

On Wed, 24 Sep 2014 14:40:35 +0100, Tim Streater wrote:

5 x fluorescent tubes 215w (2', 40w each)

Are these on a lot? Look to making changes here.

Agreed, swap out the banks of 2 and 3 2' tubes with a single 5' for
each. 2 x 58 = 116 W...

What is slightly worrying is that it seems to be obvious that this

usage is us specific rather than building specific. In other
words, if
we moved from this Victorian pile to a modern, insulated 2 bed
bungalow
and took our current habits with us, electricity consumption would
not
change.

Except changing the habits or lights is perhaps easier than moving.

Yeah but the point is household energy consumption is really down to
the life style of the occupants rather than anything to do with the
building, provided you exclude space heating.

If all the lights that are currently on (16) were 60 W incandescants
they would double our current load to 2 kW. Most of those 16 are CFLs
so I'd say the actual lighting load is less than 1/4 of the 1 kW we
are taking.

--
Cheers
Dave.

"Johny B Good" wrote in message
...

On Wed, 24 Sep 2014 10:33:37 +0100, "Richard"
wrote:

"Johny B Good" wrote in message
. ..

On Tue, 23 Sep 2014 13:45:36 +0100, "Richard"
wrote:

"Tim Streater" wrote in message
et...

In article , News
wrote:

In message o.uk,
Dave
Liquorice writes
On Mon, 22 Sep 2014 13:23:19 +0100, News wrote:

when we've run out of oil.

I keep a close eye on the oil, weekly sight glass reading and
extrapolate when it's likely to run out.

Indeed. We use a Watchman which, despite a few negative comments
here,
works rather well.

Same here.

Right. Progress. Pictures of our fuse boxes here :

http://www.binnsroad.co.uk/misc/meter1/index.html

Looks a bit like our under-stairs cupboard. :-)

Even more progress. Have found the monitor which E.on sent me um,
eons
ago. One clamp to go around the main supply cable. Will that be the
thick red cable to the left of the meter, in the bottom picture?

Can you figure out where the supply enters? I guess it then goes to the
meter.

Eon sent us one too, when we were with them. Useful to have on the desk
next to me.

I bought one of these:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B000Q7PJGW/

in 2009 - very useful for seeing what juice is going through a
particular socket if you want to measure e.g. a fridge/freezer or a
telly. It can give you instantaneous measurements and average over some
period but doesn't store any data.

I have one of these:
http://www.headingpower.com/p-302-wa...l-1506210.aspx
Quite handy.

A look at pages 10 and 11 of the user guide shows an accuracy of
+/-5% (ok, fair enough but) +/- 10W on a wattage range of 0 to 4416
watts?

Is it really limited to only being able to measure to within plus or
minus 10 watts?

TBH, I haven't bothered to check the absolute accuracy. I got it so that I
could have an estimate of the consumption for various electrical items. I
really am not that concerned whether an appliance consumes 100W or 110W as
that 10W is not going to bankrupt me.
YMMV

Well, it certainly did that with a couple of £8.99 digital "Power"
Meters my dad bought in Aldi about a decade back. The experience of
"The 'cheap digital watt meter" as demonstrated by these two examples
rather soured my view of the more expensive 'cheap' digital wattmeters
that were available at the time such as the classic "Kill-A-Watt"(tm)
and its European variants in popular use by the home energy brigade (a
group largely dominated by the Yanks).

This cheap Aldi meter (model #DEM1379 for the more curious) seemed to
work more like a simple VA meter, especially for loads less than 100W
varying by up to +/- 10W on some 10 to 20 watt electronic loads (as
measured with a real wattmeter - the MetraWatt model I've mentioned
elsewhere).

In short, it was fekin' useless for checking the stuff I wanted to
check (wallwarts, PCs and similar type loads). Even treating its
readings as VA measurements didn't seem to account for its
unpredictable behaviour.

I guess they'd rather skimped on the quality of the ADC chips and the
processor that was supposed to calculate each product of voltage and
current sample taken at a fast enough sampling rate to sum the results
to generate a true(ish) rms value of the power consumed by the load.

It just disturbs me a little to see mention of a +/- 10W accuracy for
a current(?) model of digital watt meter. That suggests it might
simply be a revamped DEM1379 (which, btw, also used a couple of AG13
button cells to provide backup power to maintain the units consumed
log).

You can test with a table lamp using various CFLs or LED and Tungsten
filament lamps to check its behaviour at the lower power levels with a
mix of purely resistive and reactive loads. If the meter is better
than the +/-10W accuracy implied, you can trust it to give meaningful
readings when checking the power consumption of your IT kit otherwise,
restrict it to toasters and kettles and buy a better one to measure
the "Tricky Loads".

From personal experience, the only models of digital watt meter I'd
care to recommend are the L61AQ[1] and the N67FU models sold by Maplin
for a penny or two shy of 20 and 10 quid respectively. The N67FU,
unlike the L61AQ (a Europeanised Kill-A-Watt) can show sub watt
figures. Above the 1W mark, they both display to a tenth of a watt.
The accuracy is about the same for both[2] so I'd recommend the
cheaper N67FU as the 'Best Value' buy.

[1] Amazon are selling the same meter (another model name) for a quid
cheaper - personally, I won't use Amazon, not just for the fact that
they're after world domination but mostly on account of their google
sponsored ads links which will take you, 99 times out of a 100, to a
page of items which have absolutely **** all to do with your search
(fekin' timewasters!).

[2] Excluding test labs, I doubt there's more than a handul of people
in the whole of the UK who can check these meters against a real
wattmeter so you can trust me on this. :-)

OK, if you insist

On Tue, 23 Sep 2014 23:44:01 +0100, Jeremy Nicoll - news posts
wrote:

Johny B Good wrote:


A plug in energy monitor will give you a chance to check the weekly total
consumption of things like fridges / freezers (any white goods items that
are run on an intermittent weekly basis).

... this isn't so easy for appliances that are built-in


Prioritise: make sure there isn't a 'phantom load', make sure the meter's
not over-reading

It's a few years since I last tried to work out what causes base load here.
The puzzles are

- central heating system: the boiler unit has a segment timer on
the front driven by an internal electric motor; it's normally
bypassed but still driven. There's an external electronic
programmer as well; sometimes I have the latter turn heating
on for some hours but have the segment timer in use too so
that the heating is on, say, for every third 15 minute period
over those hours. The boiler also of course has its main
PCB and - when heating is on - the pumps. I don't imagine it
uses much, but it's on all the time...

Its supply is via a fused spur unit.

All valid considerations. I agree these sort of fixed connected loads
are problematical with regard to verifying their actual consumption.
Digital controllers usually only take a watt or two, the CH pump
usually somewhere in the region of 50 to 100 watts (the old Grundfoss
UPS 15-60 3 speed pump I pulled from my CH system a few years ago is
rated at 45, 70 and 105 watts for the three speed options - can't
recall what the replacement is rated at). The Honeywell motorised
diverter valve takes 6 watts and I'd expect less than a watt for a
motor driven time switch.

The most practical way to get such readings, without intercepting the
feed to connect a watt meter, is to shut everything else off and
monitor the suppliers KWH meter for a sufficiently long sampling
period (counting disk revs or led blinks) to at least keep the error
down to less than 10%. In the case of the CH, this might take half an
hour or so (circa 100 watt load, mainly the pump).


- alarm system - half a dozen PIRs, 2 smoke detectors, 2 control
panel/keypads with illuminated displays, active siren boxes on
two sides of the house with tell-tale LED flashes... all on a
wired system.

And, like the boiler, no simple way to intercept the mains supply
to measure it. I have wondered if anyone makes a plug that one
could use on a flying lead to insert into the spur's fuse holder
to break out a connection?

You might be able to make one up but the main problem will be
accessing the neutral connection (although you could get away with
using a handy earth bonded point as a substitute neutral - the meter
draws only microamps from the neutral for the voltage sensor). It'll
be tricky enough making up a fuse cartridge 'plug' to divert the live
via the meter's current sensor but doable with a little ingenuity.



- halogen hob; it's connected via T&E to a kitchen oven supply; if
I bought the sort of energy monitor that's meant to be clipped
to meter tails could I get a reading by clipping that around the
T&E?

That may work ok if the voltage probe relies on a galvanic connection
to the live (or has that as an option. Some of these clamp on current
sensors designed to clamp around meter tails also use the clamp itself
to sense the live voltage via capacitive coupling which may be
compromised when clamped round a thinner cable (reduced coupling of
the electric field (voltage) which will give a lower reading than
actual.


- ovens ... timer is on all the time; surely this uses hardly any
power, but it's quite old technology so maybe it wastes more
than I'd expect. ISTR the supply is from a 13A socket but it's
hidden behind kitchen units.

It's unlikely to be more than a watt or two when 'switched off'. If
you really need to 'know', you can always fumble around to gain access
to the 13A socket.



- PIR-controlled outside light, permanently wired into a lighting
circuit... though there's an isolator switch... Can one use the
sort of plug-in energy monitor that's meant to be plugged into a
13 A socket to measure power used by a light - there must be a
L & N running through the isolator to the light so presumably I
could divert them to a 13A socket, plug in the monitor & connect
flex from a 13A plug to the outward part of the light's supply?

That's certainly a workable solution. It just needs a modicum of care
and common sense. Presumably the main aim here is to log the
consumption over a few days of use (you know what the lamp takes, you
just don't know how much run time it'll typically be clocking up - the
rest of the circuit standby consumption is unlikely to be more than a
watt or two, but you'll be able to verify this to remove such
'mystery' from your estimates)

When I installed the security light a couple of decades ago, I picked
up the power from the top floor ring main via a 5A fused connector
unit. I just didn't fancy having a 500W halogen switch on surge
risking a blown lighting fuse on the upstairs and basement lighting
circuit (or, for that matter, the ground floor lighting circuit).

If I wanted to connect an 'energy meter' I'd have to use a cheap
extension lead as a 'breakout box for the plug in meter and wire it
into the FU box for the duration.



- bell transformer, meant to be illuminating a bell-push, but I
think the bulb's blown... so presumably the transformer uses
nothing at all, or a negligible amount?

Some of the older ones could be using as much as 4 or 5 watts just
keeping themselves at nice and toasty 40 to 50 degrees. A good quality
bell transformer could well be wasting as little as half a watt or
less with the lamp in the illuminated bell push consuming a further
half watt or so with the bell itself perhaps taking no more than
another watt or two on each press of the bell push.

My solution for the front door bell was to use a battery powered
ex-GPO trembler bell (with a wireless bell push wired, via blocking
diode across the bell push contacts so the 3 x 9v PP3 battery pack
bought in poundland didn't backfeed into the 12v powered wireless
sender unit used to signal the repeater 'bell unit' I keep in my
upstairs office - the GPO trembler bell is mounted right onto the
front door frame).

I think I replaced the decade or so old 16 by AA cell 24v battery
pack with the PP3 pack just over a year ago. I certainly expect the
poundland '27 volt' battery to last at least 12 months or more, making
the running cost far cheaper than a typical mains powered bell (even
the most efficient of mains powered illuminated bell push doorbells is
going to struggle to compete with that level of economy :-)

Again, if you want to check the actual consumption of the mains
powered bell, you're going to have to intercept the mains feed to plug
in your 'energy monitor'. for the stakes involved (around a fiver's
worth on the annual electricity bill), I'd be inclined to leave this
exercise on the back burner for now.

Getting a handle on your PIR controlled flood lighting, however,
would, imo, be worth the hassle involved since it is potentially a
higher stakes game (a 3 to 5 hundred watt lamp running for 3 to 10
minutes at a time, maybe a few dozen times a night can add a
significant amount of running cost comparable to your daily use of the
electric kettle!).
--
J B Good

In article , alan_m
scribeth thus
On 23/09/2014 21:56, tony sayer wrote:

But still the 17 watt load!


Have you left the loft light on?

Nope..

Have you got a TV distribution amp wired to your lighting circuit in the
loft?

Nope, thats on a spur off the ring main..


The accuracy of measurement is probably not specified for a reading that
low so 17W may just be the figure it gives if it sees just a mains
voltage with near zero current. I doubt if it is much better than +/-5%
at 1KW.

Well if you pull that fuse it drops to Zero so some current must be
going somewhere down that particular circuit.

I'll stick me bench Fluke meter across the fuse holder when a get a
moment as see what that sez...

cheers..





--
Tony Sayer

Johny B Good wrote:


The most practical way to get such readings, without intercepting the feed
to connect a watt meter, is to shut everything else off and monitor the
suppliers KWH meter for a sufficiently long sampling period (counting disk
revs or led blinks) to at least keep the error down to less than 10%. In
the case of the CH, this might take half an hour or so (circa 100 watt
load, mainly the pump).

Thinking about this, I think my last attempt might have been before quite a
lot of rewiring was done, and now there's probably more separate circuits
than before, so using the supplier's meter and selective turning off of some
circuits might actually be easier...

And, I can also work out how much power one unit on a circuit uses (even if
it's hard to get at) if I can use the plug-in thing to monitor some other
units on the same circuit (eg temporarily running them off an extension lead
connected to the plug-in thing).

So eg I could use the plug-in meter to measure the fridge freezer's use, but
make sure only the oven was also on the same ring main, turn off everything
except that ring main, then oven use = supplier's meter - plug-in meter.


And, like the boiler, no simple way to intercept the mains supply
to measure it. I have wondered if anyone makes a plug that one
could use on a flying lead to insert into the spur's fuse holder
to break out a connection?

You might be able to make one up but the main problem will be accessing
the neutral connection

Good point...

(although you could get away with using a handy earth bonded point as a
substitute neutral - the meter draws only microamps from the neutral for
the voltage sensor). It'll be tricky enough making up a fuse cartridge
'plug' to divert the live via the meter's current sensor but doable with a
little ingenuity.

But for example for the alarm's spur, there's a 13A socket right next to it;
I could take a neutral wire from a 13A plug (with nothing connected to its L
or E pins).

Maybe I should take the faceplate off the fused spur unit and interecept the
supply much as I suggested for the PIR outside lights.


- halogen hob; it's connected via T&E to a kitchen oven supply; if
I bought the sort of energy monitor that's meant to be clipped
to meter tails could I get a reading by clipping that around the
T&E?

That may work ok if the voltage probe relies on a galvanic connection to
the live (or has that as an option. Some of these clamp on current sensors
designed to clamp around meter tails also use the clamp itself to sense
the live voltage via capacitive coupling which may be compromised when
clamped round a thinner cable (reduced coupling of the electric field
(voltage) which will give a lower reading than actual.

These things designed to go around a L meter tail; are they influenced by an
adjacent (very adjacent in T&E) neutral?



- ovens ... timer is on all the time; surely this uses hardly any
power, but it's quite old technology so maybe it wastes more
than I'd expect. ISTR the supply is from a 13A socket but it's
hidden behind kitchen units.

It's unlikely to be more than a watt or two when 'switched off'. If you
really need to 'know', you can always fumble around to gain access to the
13A socket.

Low wattage - I certainly hope so, but I remember a certain amount of
desperation when trying to work out what else was on in the house, to
account for more load..


- PIR-controlled outside light, permanently wired into a lighting
circuit... though there's an isolator switch... Can one use the
sort of plug-in energy monitor that's meant to be plugged into a
13 A socket to measure power used by a light - there must be a
L & N running through the isolator to the light so presumably I
could divert them to a 13A socket, plug in the monitor & connect
flex from a 13A plug to the outward part of the light's supply?

That's certainly a workable solution. It just needs a modicum of care and
common sense. Presumably the main aim here is to log the consumption over
a few days of use (you know what the lamp takes, you just don't know how
much run time it'll typically be clocking up - the rest of the circuit
standby consumption is unlikely to be more than a watt or two, but you'll
be able to verify this to remove such 'mystery' from your estimates)

Yes, I'd want to measure several nights' use.


- bell transformer, meant to be illuminating a bell-push, but I
think the bulb's blown... so presumably the transformer uses
nothing at all, or a negligible amount?

Some of the older ones could be using as much as 4 or 5 watts just
keeping themselves at nice and toasty 40 to 50 degrees. A good quality
bell transformer could well be wasting as little as half a watt or
less with the lamp in the illuminated bell push consuming a further
half watt or so with the bell itself perhaps taking no more than
another watt or two on each press of the bell push.

Before the rewise, the bell transformer was screwed into a brick subwall
well under the floor - so (in line with my other thread, unlikely to be much
of a fire risk!) - and just wired into the nearest 13A plug - so easy to
measure... if only I had done then. But during the rewire the sparks
mounted it on the wooden board that the CU is on, making its connection
nearly impossible to get at...

It's always irritated me that illuminated bell pushes have bulbs that burn
out reletively quickly, spare bulbs are/were hard to get and fiddly to
change over. When I came here the cable through the wall into the back of
the bell push was friable and really short... I put a surface mount box and
blank plate on the inside wall near it, into which the supply from the
transformer & the cable out to the bell sounder & the bell-push wires now
all come... so that I could change the through-wall cable easily AND have
some spare cable coiled up in the box so that there was a few inches of
spare to work with each time I took the bell push off the wall.


Thanks for your thoughts!

--
Jeremy C B Nicoll - my opinions are my own.

Email sent to my from-address will be deleted. Instead, please reply
to replacing "aaa" by "284".

On 2014-09-24 13:57:04 +0000, Johny B Good said:

My message was simply, "For sanity's sake, _don't_ fit ceiling
downlighters _anywhere_ in a domestic property!"

Well they're not that bad as long as THEY TURN THE THINGS OFF afterwards*

M.

* After say cooking my dinner, so that's a good trade-off.

In message , News
writes
In message , fred writes
In article , News
writes
In message , fred writes

Back to that daisy chained cable, then yes, the shop is very likely. At
one time, pre shop, there was a room off the kitchen, which was extended
to the pavement, to create the shop. At least 30 years ago. Logic
suggests the original room would have had power fed from the house
supply, but house and shop would have been separated when the shop was
created.

I'll explain what my concerns are over that spur so you are aware of
the risks.

OK, read and understood. Thanks. As you say, it must have been
installed like that by the power company. I shouldn't go into the back
of the shop (leased to someone else) but I will, just to see what the
incoming mains leads look like at that end.

Been outside with binoculars. A support cable from the pole on the
pavement attached to an insulator bolted to my chimney stack. Two
incoming cables wrapped around the support cable. Those two cables
amalgamate my side of the insulator and disappear into a metal conduit
which goes through the roof into the loft, fairly close to the main
fuse and consumer units (OK, not fuse boxes g).

That too is close to where the shop attaches to the house. The only
test I can really do re house/shop is turn off the power in the house
on a Sunday, then go into the shop and make sure all the lights and
sockets are live. Any dead will be cause for concern.

Attempting to prove a negative is not positive fault finding. I would
turnoff the power during the day then go round to the shop and see if
they are running around like headless chickens wondering why their tills
have stopped working and their freezers are all defrosting.
--
bert

In message , charles
writes
In article ,
News wrote:
In message , John
Rumm writes
So I slapped a clamp meter round one of the meter tails, and switched
off various bits to see what showed up...

Interesting. So, if I am reading these figures correctly, that is a
total draw of 6.07 amps. What I don't know, is how to convert that to
KWph. In other words, if you used exactly 6.07 amps for one hour, how
many units of electricity would that be?

try multiplying by 0.24 That comes out at 1.45kWh

Or even better 0.23
--
bert

On 24/09/14 22:29, bert wrote:
In message , charles
writes
In article ,
News wrote:
In message , John
Rumm writes
So I slapped a clamp meter round one of the meter tails, and switched
off various bits to see what showed up...

Interesting. So, if I am reading these figures correctly, that is a
total draw of 6.07 amps. What I don't know, is how to convert that to
KWph. In other words, if you used exactly 6.07 amps for one hour, how
many units of electricity would that be?

try multiplying by 0.24 That comes out at 1.45kWh

Or even better 0.23

Notionally or in reality?

In message o.uk, Dave
Liquorice writes
On Wed, 24 Sep 2014 14:47:48 +0100, Chris French wrote:

2 x laptop chargers 140w

Presumably chargeing their attached laptops, not alot you can do
about that. Modern switched mode power supplys/chargers are pretty
effcient.

fridge and fridge freezer 275w (but I think only one was running)

Is one of them old? Or both, possibly? May be worth re-investing.

We've a fairly old about (20 years?) under counter freezer that draws
100W when running. Not sure what the new (about a year or so) fridge
does

With thse devices it's not so much the amount they draw, the laws pf
physics dictate that to shift X amount of heat from A to B you need Y
amount of input power. How often the heat pump needs to run to keep
the inside cold is what matters, and old relatively poorly insulated
device will run more often than a modern AAAdouble plus highly
insulated one.

Good point.

My PC 240w (scary)

Agreed :-)

Sounds like and old Pentium 4 :-)

Or a 1 GHz single core Athlon that I'm using, though I think it's
only about 150W. It probably does chomp through 2 to 3 units/day
though. One day I'll change it, *IF* I get a 120 W saving (ie 180 W
down to 60 W) that would be £80/year, payback in 3 years ish. Hmmm...

240 W for 16 hours (0800 to 0000) is 4.3 units.

Yup, one reason for getting my HP Microserver a few years ago, was how
much power the old PC I was using before was consuming. And when it only
cost me about £120 (initial HDD's came out of the old machine) it soon
payed back
--
Chris French

In message , Johny B Good
writes
On Wed, 24 Sep 2014 07:52:25 +0000 (UTC), Adrian
wrote:

On Wed, 24 Sep 2014 03:32:38 +0100, Johny B Good wrote:

Such "Downlighters" are the spawn of the Devil. Sometime in the past,
a **** of a "Lighting Designer" (no doubt calling himself a fashion
designer) in the employ of a lighting accessories manufacturer, decided
the mis appropriation of these lamps into a stylish table lamp in an
exercise of "Fashion over Function" would be a "Jolly good wheeze" and
set the ball rolling which eventually led to the concept of ceiling
downlighter luminaries we loathe today.

These spot lighting lamps did have a legitimate use to begin with
which was, essentially, to provide an unobtrusive source of spot
illumination in retail stores for such things as shop window and counter
displays of the "Goods on Show".

We should all go back to lovely flouro strip lights everywhere,
especially in the living room, eh?

I wasn't suggesting going to that extreme as you know full well,
although fluorescent tubes have been available in circular form for
just such "Not out of place in the Living Room" usage for the past 4
decades or so. Now we repeat the same exercise using small, highly
loaded spiral tubes, cunningly disguised as incandescent bulbs.

My message was simply, "For sanity's sake, _don't_ fit ceiling
downlighters _anywhere_ in a domestic property!"

I wouldn't quite go along with that.

As with most things, they are fine used in the right location. True they
aren't on the whole good for providing general illumination in a room.

But I have used them quite successfully in a bathroom - the room was
small, it can provide nice lighting for a bathroom - I think because of
all the light and reflective surfaces, and it can highlight areas of the
room. 4 downlighters, + a couple of small lights each side of a mirror
to light the face provided good lighting for the room.

Also, than can be used for task lighting in kitchens, our friend have
them over an island unit in their kitchen and they work well there.
--
Chris French

On Wed, 24 Sep 2014 21:28:04 +0100, Jeremy Nicoll - news posts
wrote:

Johny B Good wrote:


The most practical way to get such readings, without intercepting the feed
to connect a watt meter, is to shut everything else off and monitor the
suppliers KWH meter for a sufficiently long sampling period (counting disk
revs or led blinks) to at least keep the error down to less than 10%. In
the case of the CH, this might take half an hour or so (circa 100 watt
load, mainly the pump).

Thinking about this, I think my last attempt might have been before quite a
lot of rewiring was done, and now there's probably more separate circuits
than before, so using the supplier's meter and selective turning off of some
circuits might actually be easier...

And, I can also work out how much power one unit on a circuit uses (even if
it's hard to get at) if I can use the plug-in thing to monitor some other
units on the same circuit (eg temporarily running them off an extension lead
connected to the plug-in thing).

So eg I could use the plug-in meter to measure the fridge freezer's use, but
make sure only the oven was also on the same ring main, turn off everything
except that ring main, then oven use = supplier's meter - plug-in meter.

You seem to be making it harder to test than is necessary. Assuming
you're talking about a small electric hob designed to be plugged into
a 13A socket on your kitchen ring main, just unplug/switch off the
fridge for the required time to get a useful reading off the
supplier's meter (or else use the plug in monitor).

The fridge will keep its cool for an hour or more provided you keep
the door closed and it shouldn't take more than 10 or 15 minutes of
rev/led blink counting on the meter to collect the data you're after
(assuming you just want to verify the manufacturer's data on element
wattage(s) - select maximum heat so the stats don't kick in too soon).

An electric oven is usually connected to a cooker point fed via a
dedicated spur from the CU, usually 6 or 10mm FT&E cable fused at 45A
(same applies for the immersion heater but fused at 15A using 2.5mm
FT&E). You'd need to make sure everything else was shut off to test
this by counting revs/blinks at the supplier's meter.

Again, you can set the oven stats to max to verify the manufacturer's
wattage figures for the various heater element combinations. Any
further analysis regarding real world consumption will be a matter of
stopwatch timings for the on/off cycling of the thermostats during a
typical cooking cycle and temperature setting. For heavy duty fixed
wired loads, the use of a plug in energy monitor is precluded so
you're really stuck with timed consumption registered by the electric
meter or a whole house energy consumption meter. You'll have to shut
off every other load in either case.

A clamp on whole house energy meter might have an option to measure
such loads by allowing you compensate for the effect on the conductor
and insulation thickness variations (possibly by using an optional
plug adapter to pick up the voltage from a handy 13A socket such as
the one commonly incorporated into most cooker points)


And, like the boiler, no simple way to intercept the mains supply
to measure it. I have wondered if anyone makes a plug that one
could use on a flying lead to insert into the spur's fuse holder
to break out a connection?

You might be able to make one up but the main problem will be accessing
the neutral connection

Good point...

(although you could get away with using a handy earth bonded point as a
substitute neutral - the meter draws only microamps from the neutral for
the voltage sensor). It'll be tricky enough making up a fuse cartridge
'plug' to divert the live via the meter's current sensor but doable with a
little ingenuity.

But for example for the alarm's spur, there's a 13A socket right next to it;
I could take a neutral wire from a 13A plug (with nothing connected to its L
or E pins).

Maybe I should take the faceplate off the fused spur unit and interecept the
supply much as I suggested for the PIR outside lights.


- halogen hob; it's connected via T&E to a kitchen oven supply; if
I bought the sort of energy monitor that's meant to be clipped
to meter tails could I get a reading by clipping that around the
T&E?

That may work ok if the voltage probe relies on a galvanic connection to
the live (or has that as an option. Some of these clamp on current sensors
designed to clamp around meter tails also use the clamp itself to sense
the live voltage via capacitive coupling which may be compromised when
clamped round a thinner cable (reduced coupling of the electric field
(voltage) which will give a lower reading than actual.

These things designed to go around a L meter tail; are they influenced by an
adjacent (very adjacent in T&E) neutral?

I'd expect the outer of the clamp to have an electric screen to
isolate it from such external influences. I haven't seen the spec on
any of these clamp on monitors but I could well imagine it might well
cater for an accessory 13A plug and cable to get a more reliable
access to the Live and neutral for sensing the voltage component. Such
an accessory would be most useful to allow testing of other fixed
wired kit where there's room to clamp onto the live wire to sense the
current component.



- ovens ... timer is on all the time; surely this uses hardly any
power, but it's quite old technology so maybe it wastes more
than I'd expect. ISTR the supply is from a 13A socket but it's
hidden behind kitchen units.

It's unlikely to be more than a watt or two when 'switched off'. If you
really need to 'know', you can always fumble around to gain access to the
13A socket.

Low wattage - I certainly hope so, but I remember a certain amount of
desperation when trying to work out what else was on in the house, to
account for more load..


- PIR-controlled outside light, permanently wired into a lighting
circuit... though there's an isolator switch... Can one use the
sort of plug-in energy monitor that's meant to be plugged into a
13 A socket to measure power used by a light - there must be a
L & N running through the isolator to the light so presumably I
could divert them to a 13A socket, plug in the monitor & connect
flex from a 13A plug to the outward part of the light's supply?

That's certainly a workable solution. It just needs a modicum of care and
common sense. Presumably the main aim here is to log the consumption over
a few days of use (you know what the lamp takes, you just don't know how
much run time it'll typically be clocking up - the rest of the circuit
standby consumption is unlikely to be more than a watt or two, but you'll
be able to verify this to remove such 'mystery' from your estimates)

Yes, I'd want to measure several nights' use.


- bell transformer, meant to be illuminating a bell-push, but I
think the bulb's blown... so presumably the transformer uses
nothing at all, or a negligible amount?

Some of the older ones could be using as much as 4 or 5 watts just
keeping themselves at nice and toasty 40 to 50 degrees. A good quality
bell transformer could well be wasting as little as half a watt or
less with the lamp in the illuminated bell push consuming a further
half watt or so with the bell itself perhaps taking no more than
another watt or two on each press of the bell push.

Before the rewise, the bell transformer was screwed into a brick subwall
well under the floor - so (in line with my other thread, unlikely to be much
of a fire risk!) - and just wired into the nearest 13A plug - so easy to
measure... if only I had done then. But during the rewire the sparks
mounted it on the wooden board that the CU is on, making its connection
nearly impossible to get at...

If the transformer is a modern one with built in thermal fuse
protection and mains terminals designed to accept 2.5mm FT&E cable,
he's probably wired it into one the ring main circuits using a short
length of 2.5mm FT&E.

I'm not sure whether the older designs of decades gone by were
designed to be so directly connected to a 30A fused circuit. Possibly
they required a mains connection via FC box with a 1 or 3 amp fuse
fitted. I'd check that your existing one has been safely connected to
the mains.

I tried searching for info on these little power vampires but the
suppliers/manufacturers seem just as coy about the running costs as
the manufacturers of UPSes are, i.e. no information whatsover on their
efficiency or idle consumption. However, one interesting point that
stood out was that the overheat protection was a one shot deal in that
once the thermal overload protection had operated, you would have to
toss it away and buy a new one. Fair enough in the case of a
transformer fault but a kick in the goolies if it were simply due to
an external wiring fault.


It's always irritated me that illuminated bell pushes have bulbs that burn
out reletively quickly, spare bulbs are/were hard to get and fiddly to
change over. When I came here the cable through the wall into the back of
the bell push was friable and really short... I put a surface mount box and
blank plate on the inside wall near it, into which the supply from the
transformer & the cable out to the bell sounder & the bell-push wires now
all come... so that I could change the through-wall cable easily AND have
some spare cable coiled up in the box so that there was a few inches of
spare to work with each time I took the bell push off the wall.

When we moved into the present house just over thirty years ago, I
decided to make good use of parts I already had in my possession
rather than spend money and make more work for myself, hence the
ex-GPO trembler bell screwed onto the door frame behind the bell push
with a couple of 8 cell AA battery holders stuck back to back with
double sided adhesive tape to provide an everlasting 24v to lend the
bell enough loudness (it could be adjusted to run off a DC voltage in
the range of 10 to 24 volt - it wasn't really loud enough off just
12v, hence the 24v battery pack (now 27 volts).

The alkaline cells lasted long enough, about 15 years or so. what
retired them was corrosion which had damaged my home made 16 cell
battery holder to the point where it seemed simpler to try a cheaper
(and far less bulky) alternative. Despite all the corrosion, the bell
still worked, albeit just a little bit queter than it once did.

Since the idea of using a large enough battery to, in theory, last
for decades was rather flawed by age induced corrosion, it finally
dawned on me that a cheaper, shorter lived battery option would be
much better. Since the local pound shops were selling zinc carbon
PP3's in packs of three, it was a no brainer to turn the whole pack
into a 27 volt battery instantly ready to hang off the screw head I'd
originally used to hang the first 'monster battery pack' off of.

All I had to do was solder a couple of straps and connect the
resulting 27 volt battery to the bell wiring. The result was a less
intrusive neater looking bell and battery installation which had only
used a couple of feet of bell wire from the bell push which also
activates the wireless bell push sender unit fitted on the inside of
the door frame so the wireless door chime in my upstairs office could
act as a repeater.

I added a a zenner dropper and reverse polarity protection diode so I
could power the sender from the 27v bell battery but I kept the 12v
internal battery which allows independent operation of the remote
office door chime for testing purposes.

However, it has also proved handy for when the XYL gets in late from
her nannying job to alert me of her return without having to shout to
be heard through the closed office door against the sound of a TV
program I would often be in the middle of watching at that time of the
evening.

The battery powered door bell has served me well these past three
decades with a running cost on a par with a mains powered bell but
without the faff of running yards of bellwire and the capital
investment of a bell transformer.

In this case, battery power trumps mains power despite the energy
cost using primary cells being several thousands of times greater than
what the electricity supplier charges. And, one more thing, it'll
still function during a power outage. :-)


Thanks for your thoughts!

You're welcome. Sorry I couldn't offer any experience based help in
regard of the bell transformer.
--
J B Good

Mark Rawlinson wrote:

On 2014-09-24 13:57:04 +0000, Johny B Good said:

My message was simply, "For sanity's sake, _don't_ fit ceiling
downlighters _anywhere_ in a domestic property!"

Well they're not that bad as long as THEY TURN THE THINGS OFF afterwards*

Occupancy sensor. Works very well in my kitchen.

Chris
--
Chris J Dixon Nottingham UK


Plant amazing Acers.

In message , bert ]
writes

Attempting to prove a negative is not positive fault finding. I would
turnoff the power during the day then go round to the shop and see if
they are running around like headless chickens wondering why their
tills have stopped working and their freezers are all defrosting.

I have already done that, and, when the power to the house was killed,
the shop lighting and computers were OK. However, the shop comprises
one room which was part of the house at one time, plus extensions to one
side and the rear. Knowing how odd [1] some of the wiring is in the
house, I would not be too surprised to find that, for example, the
sockets in that part of the shop which was originally within the house
are still fed from the house. Those sockets would not be part of usual
shop usage, and would take a while for anyone to realise they were dead.

[1] Not odd as in dangerous, but odd as in four consumer units/fuse
boxes, with not a great deal of logic, at least to me.

--
Graeme