I am busy investigating why my household has an unusually high electricity consumption. Over the past few weeks I have been manually measuring the consumption of many electrical devices in my house (such as the TV, computers, washing machines etc) in order to determine what could be using high amounts of energy. After accounting for all the big energy-consuming devices (and some rough estimates of lights etc), I still have an unaccounted 45kWh of electricity usage.
As I am not sure which devices could possibly still account for this usage, I am starting to think some electricity is leaking somewhere. However before I want to go over all the wiring in my house I wanted to check if perhaps the power quality in my house is bad perhaps accounting for a higher power draw than I am assuming.
In order to determine this I measured the AC voltage from the plug using a resistive voltage divider (and floating the oscilloscope) which showed some distortion (I think). I was wondering whether someone here might know if this distortion is significant and if it could be worth renting a proper harmonic power analyser to further analyse this problem...
Furthermore while doing this experiment, I found that occasionally there was a large voltage spike, but was not sure whether it was a quirk from my oscilloscope.
I look forward to getting some thoughts on this. And if someone has tips on further investigating unexplained electricity usages I am all ears!
As I am not sure which devices could possibly still account for this usage, I am starting to think some electricity is leaking somewhere. However before I want to go over all the wiring in my house I wanted to check if perhaps the power quality in my house is bad perhaps accounting for a higher power draw than I am assuming.
In order to determine this I measured the AC voltage from the plug using a resistive voltage divider (and floating the oscilloscope) which showed some distortion (I think). I was wondering whether someone here might know if this distortion is significant and if it could be worth renting a proper harmonic power analyser to further analyse this problem...
Furthermore while doing this experiment, I found that occasionally there was a large voltage spike, but was not sure whether it was a quirk from my oscilloscope.
I look forward to getting some thoughts on this. And if someone has tips on further investigating unexplained electricity usages I am all ears!