Do electricity meters measure power factor corrected values or not? If not could you add a large inductive load to whatever you plug into the mains to lower your bill? (plug some fluorescent lights into your mains gang for example)
Watt-Hour meters measure actual energy useage, taking into account the power factor. However, utility companies charge industrial customers a power factor penalty. As a result industrial customers often install their own power factor correction equipment.
Residential watt hour meters record only the energy consumed from the grid, not the energy borrowed by inductive or capacitive loads that is returned to the grid twice per cycle. Adding an inductive or capacitive load across your power panel will increase the current through it, but will neither make the meter run faster or slower. You also can't extract any useful work from that current.
Thanks,
not that I would have tried it mind ; )
Dave
Adding the _correct_ inductance or capacitance across your power panel will _reduce_ the current through it, by suppling the correct reactive VARs to resonate with whatever reactance you have attached downstream of the power panel.
Unfortunately in a home environment this would have to change all the time as loads are switched in or out. And as noted, this wouldn't buy you much.
Where you _could_ use reactance profitably is if you have a big piece of equipment that's challenging the current capacity of it's circuit -- wires and circuit breakers don't 'care' about power, just current. So canceling out reactive VARs to (for instance) a big motor could be a good thing.
If you need to do this, however, you're not the average joe homeowner.
-- Tim Wescott Wescott Design Services http://www.wescottdesign.com Posting from Google? See http://cfaj.freeshell.org/google/ "Applied Control Theory for Embedded Systems" came out in April. See details at http://www.wescottdesign.com/actfes/actfes.html
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