A kilowatt hour meter is used to identify the amount of electricity a residence uses. It is used to monitor power consumption for homeowners to be wary of their energy consumption.
To read it, it must read from right to left at the dials, recording the lowest number on each of them. If a dial reads a solid number, reduce it by 1 if the dial to the right reads between a 9 and a 0. To calculate a kilowatt hour reading simply take the reading and subtract by the last month's reading to calculate the monthly reading. An important thing to note about reading the power meters is to note the multipliers on the front, for instance, multiply the total reading by four if there was on the front a symbol X4.
There are two ways a kilowatt hour meter works. One is solid state and the other is electromechanical. The solid state type usually uses a current transformer to read the power levels. It does this by monitoring the conductors that carry a current through the transformer.
The second type, electromechanical, uses an aluminum disc acted upon by a pair of coils. One of these coils is meant to produce a type of flux that will respond accordingly to the current produced by the magnet on the insider of the reader. A permanent magnet is attached to the inside and is designed to exert the force directly replicated from the speed of the spinning discs. The way an electromechanical kilowatt hour meter works is similar to that of a typical hard drive.
The kilowatt hour meter was designed in 1883 and was patented by Dr. Hermann Aron as a simple DC meter. The first DC power meter was introduced to the market in 1888 to be commercialized. Prior to its invention, a similar device existed only to monitor the current power consumption directly proportional only to that exact point and time, Aron's design however, evolved that concept to monitor energy consumption over time. AC power took a bit longer to monitor as the invention of AC power by Nickola Tesla had followed many years after the invention of DC power. The original meter designed to monitor AC power came from a Hungarian by the name of Otto Blathy and earned him an award at the Ganz Works at the Frankfurt Faire in 1889. As the years passed, these designs had become intertwined and evolved to create the kilowatt hour meter today.
![[Valid RSS feed]](http://www.alltimeinfo.com/images/icon_Rss.png "XML Feed For RSS"){kind=icon}
Category Rss Feed
Print This Article
Add To Favorites
