explain what a home electric meter measures?
Thursday, December 31st, 2009 at
5:43 am
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It measures kilowatt hours that are used by that household.
The kilowatt hour is a measure of work, the watt is a measure of power. The amount of wattage times the amount of time is the amount of work done.
Your home electric meters measures your energy expenditure of your whole house I believe. So how much electricity your house uses in kilowatt hours. (i.e. lights and appliances)
It measures kilowatt hours of electric
It takes Ten 100 watt light bulbs an hour of burning to use one kilowatt of electricity.
A clothes dryer uses 1 kilowatt of electricity per hour if I remember correctly.
The previous answers are all pretty good. I could add the following which you might find use full
most meters read power use in kWh which as is stated in the other answers means kilo watts per hour. This measurement is not an official SI unit. The Watt, a unit of power represents the energy per unit of time, and in the SI system
1 Watt (W) = 1 Joule (J) / 1 Second. So a kWh really represents:
3’600’000 Joules of energy or 3.6MJ
what does that mean? It means that 1kWh represents the amount of energy needed to use a device that uses 1000W of power for exactly one hour.
So when you get your bill at the end of the month (or whatever is your billing schedule) for say 1000kWh it means that for that billing cycle you would have used-up:
3.6Gigajoules which could be:
6 seconds of the full output of 600MW nuclear power plant
666’667 AA batteries!
103,45L (27.33 Gallons) of Regular Gas (assuming a full conversion of chemical to electric energy, which is not possible!)
or
97.30kg (214 lbs) of fat! assuming you could turn all the energy contained in dietary fat to electrical power (which is not possible!)
The electric company our houses are hooked up to is really a company that sells energy (electric energy) thus electric meters therefore are supposed to measure this kind of energy which our electrical devices at home needs to operate. It is expressed in KilowattHours (KWHrs) meaning the amount of electrical power in watts times the amount of time in hours that that power is used in our houses.