[SunRescue] Power concerns.

[James Lockwood]

On Thu, 8 Mar 2001, Chris Byrne wrote:

> It is difficult to do this for yourself without specialized equipment, but
> you can get an good electrical contractor to do a power totalization test
> for you. They can test the max draw of any single appliance, as well as
> the mx draw of your entire electrical system, and they should be able to
> come up with an average.

Or just get a good ammeter which can measure power factor.  Probably
cheaper too.

> Considering that the apartment only had a 40amp servce panel the most I
> could possibly have been drawing through the wiring of the building was
> 4.8kw/hr, and there's only 720 hours in a month, this a maximum of 345.6
> kw/hr.

Nitpick.  Your draw is measured in KW, not KW/Hr.  Watts measure power,
not energy.  Your total consumption of energy is measured in KW-Hr, not
KW/Hr.

You could have said your max draw was 4.8KW, which is roughly 17.2MJ/Hr. 
Over a month this is a maximum energy consumption of 3456KW-Hr (not KW/Hr,
which is an essentially meaningless unit of measure) or roughly 3.5MW-Hr. 

-James [licensed CA electrical contractor]