Energy measurement

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En­er­gy mea­sure­ment (or rather en­er­gy con­sump­tion mea­sure­ment) deals with the most ac­cu­rate metro­log­i­cal ob­ser­va­tion and analy­sis of the en­er­gy con­sump­tion or en­er­gy de­mand of a system.

What are the goals of energy measurement?

The pri­ma­ry goal of en­er­gy mea­sure­ment is to achieve en­er­gy sav­ings in view of the ever-in­creas­ing en­er­gy costs and ef­fi­cien­cy im­prove­ments in the con­text of en­er­gy mon­i­tor­ing and en­er­gy man­age­ment. Trou­bleshoot­ing is an­oth­er rea­son for mea­sur­ing en­er­gy. Con­tin­u­ous resid­ual cur­rent mon­i­tor­ing can, for ex­am­ple, de­tect and lo­cal­ize leak­age cur­rents and in­su­la­tion faults in tech­ni­cal sys­tems. Check­ing and vi­su­al­iz­ing flow rates, tem­per­a­ture curves and pres­sure dif­fer­ences of me­dia in cool­ing and heat­ing cir­cuits can al­so be part of an en­er­gy measurement.

The measurement of energy consumption

De­pend­ing on the type of en­er­gy (elec­tric­i­ty, heat, etc.), dif­fer­ent mea­sur­ing de­vices and mea­sur­ing meth­ods are used for en­er­gy mea­sure­ment. In the case of elec­tric­i­ty, an elec­tric­i­ty me­ter (kilo­watt-hour me­ter, en­er­gy me­ter) can be used to di­rect­ly mea­sure the to­tal en­er­gy sup­plied from the util­i­ty grid. Mo­bile elec­tric­i­ty me­ters can be used for mea­sur­ing sam­ples from in­di­vid­ual de­vices. These are in­sert­ed be­tween the sock­et and the plug of the device.

How do I calculate the energy consumption myself?

In or­der to cal­cu­late the en­er­gy con­sump­tion of an elec­tri­cal de­vice, you on­ly need to know the pow­er of the de­vice (in watts). This is mul­ti­plied by the run­time (in hours). The re­sult (in watt-hours) is then di­vid­ed by 1,000 to ob­tain the pow­er con­sump­tion in kilowatt-hours.

A prac­ti­cal ex­am­ple: A desk lamp with 10 watts is op­er­at­ed for 5 hours. Cal­cu­la­tion: 15 W x 5 h = 75 Wh : 1,000 = 0.075 kWh

Smart meter

A smart me­ter is one of the in­tel­li­gent me­ter­ing sys­tems for en­er­gy con­sump­tion. In ad­di­tion to the dig­i­tal elec­tric­i­ty me­ter, it al­so con­tains an in­ter­face for da­ta trans­mis­sion of the mea­sure­ments to a col­lec­tion point. This en­ables a clear vi­su­al­iza­tion of all in­di­vid­ual en­er­gy con­sump­tions in the com­pa­ny or at home every second.

What is energy?

With the term en­er­gy, orig­i­nat­ing from the Greek and trans­lat­ed as “act­ing force”, we un­der­stand the abil­i­ty to per­form work, to emit heat or to ra­di­ate light. If we ap­ply this de­f­i­n­i­tion to every­day sit­u­a­tions, it means that we need en­er­gy to trans­port things from one place to an­oth­er, to op­er­ate the heat­ing sys­tem in the house or to sup­ply the soc­cer sta­di­ums with suf­fi­cient light. 

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