I have been trying to break down our electrical use to see how much power things in our house use.
I have a small watt meter for things that plug into the wall but our larger loads and things that run on 230 volts I didn’t have a good way to measure until now.
I recently bought an inductive wattmeter that keeps track of the power that is used.
It needs to be wired in parallel with the load to know the voltage applied but the current is measured inductively.
I plan to measure the stove, dryer, furnace, garage heater, and water pump in the future but for now I am checking the hot water heater.
It’s currently hooked up and clocking, one of our kids took a shower that turned into a bath followed by a shower last night. I would think that would be expensive but as it turned out it was 0.95KwH or about 10 cents.
I checked it’s accuracy with my fluke meter for both current and voltage and they are within 1%. I’m going to let it run for a few weeks and see how expensive a water heater is to operate. I will post the results.
Below is a picture of the meter on the water heater.
