Wattson electricity meter - explanation required!

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toberodiSun 07/10/07 18:09

Earlier, in a fit of internet shopping clickery, and being green, I ordered one of these:

http://www.diykyoto.com/

It's called a Wattson. You clip a sensor to the wire between your fuse box and electricity meter, which wirelessly transmits data to the Wattson box. This box uses softly glowing colours and a numerical display to tell you how much electrical power your home is using. Hopefully this will enable me to see which appliances are the most power hungry, and encourage me to turn the lights off in rooms I'm not occupying!

My question is: how does this clip-on sensor work? How can it tell how much electricity is flowing through an insulated wire? How accurate is such a sensor likely to be? I need an electrical-type boffin to explain it to me, in short words please.

tx!

keithySun 07/10/07 18:12

Oh, glad you bought a Wattson - my mate is one of the guys who runs the company and who designed it :)

The clip-on sensor measures the current flow through the cable to which it is clipped using "induction" (well, I'm assuming that's how it does it - I don't know the details of Wattson itself, but I know that's how I'd do it, how most electrical bods do it, and I'm certain that's how Wattson will do it too)
It's an electrical thing where current flowing in one wire causes current to flow in another wire if that other wire is close enough to it - it's the way transformers work, for example.

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