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Measuring Whole House Power Consumption

Birdog

New Member
Joined
Feb 10, 2021
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32
I'm running my house on generator power and am shopping off grid systems. I've been using a clamp meter to check the draw on all of the fixtures / items in my house. Question. Is it possible to measure whole house draw by simply firing everything up in the house and clamping onto a hot wire of the generator 240v output cable just downstream of the generator plug? I tried it with my well pump and got slightly lower numbers at the generator than at the well pump switch.
 
Depends if your generator can handle the entire house at once, but that should get you close. Would also be useful to have an AC clamp ammeter that has an INRUSH function so you can check the surge of big motors.

Might be more than you're looking for... but...


Looks pretty sweet.

There are other systems that just monitor the mains or both legs and don't get down to the individual circuits, and most of them record usage info, so you know what you use over time - not just based on an instantaneous load.
 
Emporia energy offers electric monitoring goodies that are pretty reliable. I use 4 of their smart plugs that allow me to watch usage on each.

 
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