Power Monitor Panel (Volts, Amps, Etc...)

[John Fieldstadt]

Hi All,

Has anyone built or installed a panel of meters or power monitor to track your electric service/use in your shop?
I will be redoing a corner of my basement into a small workshop area. I will be running a dedicated circuit for the lights and then one or two circuits for running my assorted power tools. I was thinking of installing a local main cut-off safety switch for each power tool circuit and after the switch installing a voltage meter and ammeter (and maybe a frequency and/or watt meter) in-line before the receptacles so that I can keep an eye on my power quality and the draw that I am putting on it. I realize that this would be a very basic set-up and that there are fancy monitoring set-ups out there but for my use it would be fine, not even necessary but nice and fun to have like a personal weather station. So I have a few questions:

1. Like I first asked, has anyone done anything similar?
2. Any thoughts on NEC issues? (I would think that so long as I used a proper enclosure and wiring that it would be okay)
3. Any suggestions on types of meters, layout, etc?

Thanks for your input!

[Rod Sheridan]

Hi John, I'm in Canada.

I did that once with portable test equipment.

For me (Electrical Technologist) it would be cute, however it would have no practical use.

If you make an enclosure to hold instrumentation you'll need things like fuses and shorting blocks for the current transformers (if used).

This will need an electrical aproval, which could more than the meters.

regards, Rod.

P.S. If your stuff is 120 volt, buy one of those plug in Kill-a-Watt meters for $30 and be done.

[Rollie Meyers]

If you have a panel in your shop add a meter can (do not bond the neutral) and buy a used KWH meter, because of all the smart meters being installed there should be a glut of them, should be easy to monitor the power consumption then. Not going to display the voltage though.


http://www.hialeahmeter.com/spwm.html

[Bill Davis]

If you have no aversion to Ebay you could look at one of these Power Meter Monitor Voltage KWh Time Watt Voltmeter Ammeter
They monitor most all you want to and are not very expensive.

[Ole Anderson]

If you have no aversion to Ebay you could look at one of these Power Meter Monitor Voltage KWh Time Watt Voltmeter Ammeter
They monitor most all you want to and are not very expensive.

I have one of those uber cheap ammeters shipped direct from China for monitoring my Dust Colector amperage. Works fine.

[Larry Frank]

I use something called "P3 International P4460 Kill A Watt EZ Electricity Usage Monitor". I bought it on Amazon for about $28. I have used to to figure out how much it costs me to run my lights, heater and some of the other 110V things in my shop.

You plug it into the outlet and then the lights into it and it will track the KWH used and the costs per hour, day, week or month.

[Jason Roehl]

If you're doing it for the sake of tinkering with some electrical/electronic stuff for the fun of it, have at it, and have fun. However, if you're doing it to try to come up with a strategy for saving money through using less electricity, forget it--you'll spend far more on the equipment and time than you'll save in electricity. Running a 2 HP router for an hour is going to be about 1.5 KWh, which is about $0.15 in my part of the country. So if you put a $30 monitoring device (like the Kill-a-Watt mentioned above) on that router, you would need to find 200 hours of not running that router to pay for it in the foreseeable future.

[John Fieldstadt]

Thanks for all the thoughts and feedback. I was thinking about it as much for just fun/tinkering as anything else. I've designed/engineered portable power distribution systems and have gone through the UL approval process so I'm comfortable with knowing that anything I do will be safe and I'll check the codes.
My space is limited so although this will be primarily a workshop area it will also be a quasi man-cave, hobby center, etc. As such I'm looking for it to be functional first but I'll be personalizing it a bit with things just to make it comfortable/unique. I like older tools, meters, gauges, radios.....stuff like that so in this case I imagined an old style panel with some functional vintage analog meters. This is a project that is a few months off at least so like many other things I do I just keep designing it in my head, revising, getting new ideas and cancelling old ones. This part of the process is one of my favorites.

[Jason Roehl]

I totally get that. I have quite a few projects under construction in my head. Probably most of them won't happen, but I'm okay with that, as long as I can manage to make a few of them come to fruition.