h a l f b a k e r yA few slices short of a loaf.
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(Using American terminology here. I'm referring to the
mains
but am not sure what Britons call the other components.)
The idea is to make standard circuit breakers with led
readouts for amperage.
It would be nice if these could communicate the reading
to a
home network by whatever method
makes sense.
[Later:] I suppose it makes more sense for the entire
breaker panel to have a readout for each bus and just use
ordinary circuit breakers. Has this already been done?
Would it cost more than the house to make such a thing?
Real time universal Wireless energy consumption monitor for Electricity
http://www.alibaba....gy_consumption.html
[angel, Mar 23 2013]
Multifunction Power Meters
http://www.smartpro...okrYCFUnMtAodjT4AGg
[angel, Mar 23 2013]
Empty breaker panel
http://crippledcoll...ctrical-02-08-1.JPG
[ytk, Mar 24 2013]
[link]
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They already do. It's just a 1-bit display. |
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Is this a real-time display of the current passing through the breaker? Power meters are already available (see linky), which are effectively the same thing (power = voltage x current). If you want it to tell you the level of overload that caused the breaker to trip, it won't be able to; a 20A breaker will only pass 20A before it trips whether the potential load was 22A or 400A. |
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"...immediate reading without possible
incomprehension’s of further elaborations." Is that a
good thing? That sentence has it all, including
apostrophe abuse! angel's link seems to be on the right
track. What I want is one of those that is also a
removable circuit breaker or else is built into the
circuit breaker panel itself. |
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// it makes more sense for the entire breaker panel
to have a readout for each bus and just use ordinary
circuit breakers. Has this already been done? Would
it cost more than the house to make such a thing?//
How are there people who understand the world so
little? |
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Sorry, MaxwellBuchanan. You aren't related to James
Clerk Maxwell, are you? If I changed the word bus for
circuit would your dismay be diluted at all? |
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//I suppose it makes more sense for the entire breaker
panel to have a readout for each bus and just use
ordinary circuit breakers.// |
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No, that makes far less sense. |
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Okay, quick rundown on what a breaker panel looks like
on the inside (in an American installation anyway—I don't
know what foreign setups use, but it's probably fairly
similar). There are two 110 volt lines (each referred to
as a “leg”, and having opposite phase from each other)
entering the breaker panel, and they each connect to a
bus that's basically a big steel plate. The two busses are
intertwined, so that alternating positions of breakers
use alternating legs (see link). |
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If you go and look at a breaker panel with breakers
installed, you'll see two kinds of breakers—single pole,
breaker and double pole, which look like two adjacent
breakers with the switches connected to each other. A
single pole is used for a 110 volt line, and a double pole
breaker, being connected to both legs, is used for a 220
volt line (usually to a dryer, HVAC, or hot water heater). |
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The breakers are designed to be modular and easily
replaceable. Designing a circuit breaker with a built-in
amperage readout would be fairly easy to do, and
probably wouldn't add much to the complexity or cost.
In fact, this isn't a new idea, as a Google search will
reveal. Designing a panel that had a built-in readout for
each circuit breaker, on the other hand, would
necessitate coming up with an entirely different, far
more complicated design, that would be very expensive
and less reliable (not to mention very difficult to replace
when it fails) than the current breaker panel design,
which basically consists of a bunch of dumb pieces of
steel inside a box. |
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Anyway, you already do have an amperage readout on
your box—it's the power company's meter, which
indicates your consumption rate in watts, which are
easily convertible to amps (and are a better metric
anyway, because they specify the actual power
consumption rate regardless of the voltage of the
circuit). There are also devices that you can plug
between the wall and your appliance that measure
consumption for individual devices, which seems far
more useful than knowing what the consumption of the
entire circuit is. |
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So in conclusion, your original idea was far better, albeit
still not terribly pointful*, except for the coolness factor
of seeing a pretty row of LED readouts on your breaker
panel—which is not to be discounted. |
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* This isn't a word, but should be. |
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I used bus incorrectly. I am looking for the reading for
each circuit (if I am using that term correctly.) I would
be happy to persuse a google search on the idea of
readouts in standard circuit breakers. The idea should
not be novel, but my google searches indicated that it
is novel. Again, my terminology may be lacking. |
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Maybe as an indication of the perceived pollution of
excess power consumption, the CB could discharge
some of the smoke that, as we know, lives inside the
wires. As the _current_ increases ( I can't bring myself
to use "Amperage", and I'm quite dismayed to see it
defined in dictionaries), more smoke leaks out. |
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I did not realize until Lings anno that smoke resided in wires but it makes sense. |
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I want a power meter on each circuit so I can figure out which one is responsible for the colossal energy use in the house. |
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You should all do a Google search for 'submetering' if you're
interested in this idea. There are systems that use just a
handful of inductive current sensors distributed around the
panel and can tell which appliances in the house are on,
even if there are many more appliances than sensors. I
found many interesting scientific/engineering papers on
submetering a year or two ago when I looked into it. |
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