I’ve got a utility meter and it’s watching the power consumption of an oil heater using a Sonoff S60 Smart Plug.
The heaters internal thermostat cuts it in and out as needed, meaning it spikes and it is thus not a smooth power consumption.
Every time it turns on, it causes a 1kw spike in the utility meter.
To my mind, I believe what I’m seeing is that the utility meter is expecting constant readings with no breaks, eg. watching a house input line, so it isn’t geared to handle the on/offs of something like this.
EDIT - If my understanding is correct, then this would also cause reading problems when we have a power cut, which is when the house goes from 0 to full function again, it would cause the same spike.
(in fact for us, it would cause three spikes because the transformer makes three attempts to re-set the connection to the grid before it gives up and stays off… so it would really mess with the utility meter measurements)
It seems that I need some way to tell the utility meter… “ok, it’s just turned on, so this 1kw figure is actually your baseline, not the 0.”
I’ve read some topics on this from several years ago, and I’m wondering whether the utility meter just wasn’t built for this kind of monitoring.
