Your typical home meter measures only real power consumed.
There is no such thing as "reactive power being delivered to you". Any reactive power that you may be concerned with will originate on your side of the meter at the load. You really don't care about it there either as long as the extra current does not cause excess resistive loss in your wires going to the meter. You could hang a large capacitor across one of your outlets and draw say 20 amps of current and the power meter would barely move. The only power that would be consumed would be from any resistive drop in the wire between your capacitor and the meter and any losses in the capacitor. The power company usually cares about large amounts of reactive power as it shows up to them as additional line loss. 73 Gary K4 FMX _____ From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of [email protected] Sent: Monday, February 09, 2009 11:39 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Repeater-Builder] OT Power Factor Very interesting subject. People don't seem to be concerned about what kind of energy they are receiving from electric power company suppliers. I've asked previously for information about what people get in their homes and repeater sites with only one response telling me taps are available to solve a high or low problem. Do phase shift capacitors have an effect on our home our test equipment, repeaters? The AC specs here are 115.2 - 124.8. A calibrated NBS Fluke 77 reads consistently on the high end, and frequently up as high as 128. The power company engineer says they can do nothing about it, that taps do not exist anywhere in the system to lower the line voltage. Only phase shift capacitors. Our older test equipment designed around a 115 volt line plus AC motors, power transformers can have a problem with saturation. On a room to room/ garage/ shop investigation how many transformers, motors are in your dweling? Those big honker 30 amp or higher power supplies on repeaters going up in smoke. What's in your wallet....I mean your electric service line? Gary K2UQ In a message dated 2/9/2009 7:30:24 A.M. Eastern Standard Time, [email protected] writes: Depends. Some customers are metered for reactive demand. It would matter then. Chuck WB2EDV ----- Original Message ----- From: Thomas Oliver <mailto:[email protected]> To: repeater-builder@ <mailto:[email protected]> yahoogroups.com Sent: Monday, February 09, 2009 2:43 AM Subject: [Repeater-Builder] OT Power Factor Question for any electrical engineers out there. Are the meters on the side of buildings metering real power or apparent power? Is power factor correction worth doing if the power company is not dinging the customer for low power factor? This article http://powerelectro <http://powerelectronics.com/power_management/motor_power_management/705PET2 3.pdf> nics.com/power_management/motor_power_management/705PET23.pdf talks about residential power factor correction and my conclusion (from this article) is the savings would never be recouped. Second conclusion is the only benefit with correction is the wires between the source and load don't heat up as much. What about the wires in the motor or transformer? do they also heat less? I would think so. Third conclusion is by correcting power factor you are helping the utility company more than yourself because these phase differences "standing waves" exist all the way back to the power generation source therefore the utility lines have more loss due to their greater length than the customers building wiring has. The reason I am researching this is a customer of mine has roughly 50 hp of total motors in his shop and wanted to know if he could save 30% on his electric bill like some salesman of power factor correction black boxes told him he could. I realize I am going to have to look at his energy bill to see if there is a charge for low power factor and maybe call the utility company to see if he will get a lower rate if he adds PFC devices tom (\__/) ... (='.'=) (")_(") _____ Who's never won? Biggest <http://music.aol.com/grammys/pictures/never-won-a-grammy?ncid=emlcntusmusi0 0000003> Grammy Award surprises of all time on AOL Music.
