There’s a mysterious box living on the side of your house. It’s practically illegible, filled with numbers and
gauges, and, frankly, frightening to everyone but your electrician:
your electric meter. What’s it thinking?
What’s it doing? How can you communicate with the strange metallic beast clinging to your home?
Where is it?
The location of each meter is varied based on the installation, but the most
common areas are on the side of the house or inside the house next to the fuse-box. Electric companies prefer to have
them on the outside so they can read the meters without having to enter your home.
Types of meters
It’s important to understand what type of electric meter you have so you can learn how to read it. There are
commonly
two types of meters: digital and dial. A digital meter is pretty easy to read. Can you read the
time on a digital clock? Can you read the odometer in your car? If you said yes to either of these, then you can read
a digital meter. If not, well, I’m not sure how you’ve reached this paragraph, but congratulations.
Digital meters come in single register or two registers; the
dual register just gives you a bit more information than
a single, which easily displays the kilowatt-hours used since the meter was installed. Each time the meter
increases, another kilowatt-hour is used.
Reading a dial meter
Dial meters can be a little nastier, mostly because we’ve all forgotten how to use anything analog in this day and age (
Samuel Gardiner just turned over in his grave). Just like a digital electric meter displays your kilowatt-hours in five numbers, dial meters do the same, but they split up the numbers into five or six individual dials (if there is a sixth dial on the right, it doesn’t matter, so don’t count it) that total up your energy consumption. Some dials are counter-clockwise, others are clockwise; that’s normal for a dial meter because the gauges track in different directions. If one of the gauges inside a dial is between two numbers, always read the lower number. If the gauge is right on a number, check the dial to the right, and round down if the dial on the right hasn’t passed 0 yet (
check this diagram for more specifics).
Once you’ve figured out how to read your electric meter, you can start to
calculate your monthly, even daily, energy use by writing down the total number and subtracting the difference over
a year, month, or day. It’s a great way to monitor your home’s energy consumption and adjust your energy use
accordingly. (Plus, it can save you hours of arguing with the customer service rep from your local energy company
about how preposterous your energy bill is. Double win!)
Still confused? Check out this video about reading your electric meter, via
Treehugger: