Sunday, June 28, 2015

Power Meter

This week I am running a 90 minute training session on ICT sustainability for a government organization, using a modified version of "How Green is My Computer". When run as a face-to-face session, I get some of the students to come out the front and measure the power use of some computer equipment using a meter. One student handles the meter, one sets up the equipment and another writes up the figures. The other students shout out suggestions and help with the calculations.

My old meter was not working and I noticed Aldi had a "Bauhn Power Meter" for $14.95. This works reasonably well, with a large LCD display. One curiosity is that it has a readout of kgCO2, but I can't find how to set the conversion factor for converting from kWh. The Model 39085 Power Meter Manual shows how to set the cost of electricity, but not the kg/kWh.

ps: The main use of such meters is education. In practice an appliance's manual is just as useful for estimating energy use, or just the class of device (desktop computers all use about the same amount of power, as do LCD monitors).

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