Measuring Building Electrical Load Using a Stopwatch

If you intend on powering most of the items fed by your utility electric meter you can
measure your total building load at any time using simply a stop watch while
.observing your meter. Follow the steps below to make this measurement
First locate the electric meter which feeds your building. To use this method, it

must be a traditional style kilowatthour meter with a rotating disk. The meters shown
.here are typical for small to medium residential services
Next, read the constant on the face of the nameplate shown as Kh. This value

is the number of watt-hours equivalent to one rotation of the disk

Now, start the desired appliances, heating or air conditioning for the condition

.to be measured
Using a stopwatch while watching for the black mark on the meter's disk,

measure the time it takes for one or more disk rotations. If the disk is rotating rapidly,
.better accuracy will be attained if you time more than one rotation
Finally, take the three values and use the equation below to calculate the watts

seen by the electric meter

Here is an example calculation for the first meter above. From the meter's face, Kh =
7.2. The time measured for 5 rotations of the disk was 24 seconds. Thus, Rev = 5 and
:T = 24 seconds. Solving for the electrical demand we have
kWh Meters
1.
Kilowatt-hour is the energy consumed by 1000 Watts in one hour. If 1kW (1000
watts) of an electrical equipment is operated for 1 hour, it would consume 1 kWh of
energy (1 unit of electricity). Figure 1.1 shows picture of analog electricity meter and
latest digital smart meter which we are going to discuss in next few chapters