[HH] instrumenting a breaker box

[Tom Metro]

Greg London wrote:
> We moved into a different house last fall and our
> electrical consumption is about double our old house.
> Was trying to figure out where the power is going.

OK, so that's a short-term investigation. Obviously you don't need to go
through the effort to instrument your whole breaker box to answer that,
but I suppose you figured if it was cheap enough you'd do that and have
a long-term solution.

The breaker panel approach might not even necessarily get you the detail
you want, if there are multiple devices on one breaker.

My recommendation would be to use some combination of Kill-A-watts[1]
and a logging multimeter with a current probe/clamp.

1.
http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&field-keywords=killawatt&index=blended&link_code=qs&sourceid=Mozilla-search&tag=wwwcanoniccom-20


> The new place has mini-splits: electrically powered
> heat pumps which provide heat and AC. Wondering how
> much power they're chewing up. and if they're cheaper
> than oil...

I've wondered that as well, but haven't attempted to run the numbers to
see if that's even likely from a theoretical standpoint.

Oil prices should be dropping this winter, finally, but who knows by how
much or how long. (Do you have an oil fired furnace already installed as
backup for when it gets too cold for the heat pumps?)

If you're willing to put in the up-front investment, your best long-term
payoff would be from replacing (or retrofitting) the heatpumps with
ground source heatpumps. (I think we talked about this after some
meeting. I believe you said your house lot was very rocky, making this
potentially very costly.)

 -Tom