Energy Meter.....how Do I Use It?

[pokolbinguy]

G'day folks,

I bought an energy meter the same as the ones from Craftbrewer (Here) .

However the instructions are rather hard to understand and don't really explain how the damn thing works.

Has anyone got one of these and got some simple to use instructions?

I worked out how to set the price and clock but not sure if I have to set anything else. I plugged in my kegerator fan to see if it was working but didn't register a running cost.... might pay to let run for more than 30 secs tho.

Any suggestions???

Cheers, Pok

 

[mesa]

Hey Pok,
I haven't really played with power meters, but I can tell you that your kegerator fan will almost certainly use so little power that it won't register. At a guess I'd say it would use about 1/100th the power of your kegerator. It would probably take about 20 hours for your little fan to use up 1 cent worth of electricity. Now if you plug it into a kettle, or turn on the actual kegerator you should get a reading. Depending on what you actually want to do with this thing, you'll probably use the "power used" feature more than any other and average data over multiple days to get a true idea of whats happening. Remember the kegerators switch on and off according to their thermostat

 

[pokolbinguy]

I have plugged it into my kegerator and will leave over night to see what happens...might take a few hours to register.

Pok

 

[razz]

I gave up after a few days and decided it used so little power it wasn't worth worrying about.

 

[Adamt]

Energy meter... sure it's not a Scientology E-Meter?

 

[pokolbinguy]

Energy meter... sure it's not a Scientology E-Meter?

WTF?

 

[Parks]

G'day folks,

I bought an energy meter the same as the ones from Craftbrewer (Here) .

However the instructions are rather hard to understand and don't really explain how the damn thing works.

Has anyone got one of these and got some simple to use instructions?

I worked out how to set the price and clock but not sure if I have to set anything else. I plugged in my kegerator fan to see if it was working but didn't register a running cost.... might pay to let run for more than 30 secs tho.

Any suggestions???

Cheers, Pok

I have one and they work well. If you have put the price of electricity in it should all be sweet. Press the 'Func' button to scroll through the different options. Wattage will be your best indication of energy use. I have 1 fridge and 1 freezer set up on Fridgemates they use about 4watts when neither compressor are active.

I would say your computer fan would use 10ish watts but that's at a complete guess...

:edit: oh, and they use less than $1 per week (winter so we'll see about summer) so don't sit there waiting for the dollar meter to go up...

 

[pokolbinguy]

Seems to be working nicely now. Kegerator seems to be costing a whoping 4cents a day to run....will be interesting to see what it goes up to in the peak of summer. Even if it works twice as hard that is only 8 cents a day....give say an average of 6 cents / day over 365 days = $21.90...nice