On the left, white text on a black background reads '5 Reasons to Monitor Power Consumption'. On the right hands wearing white work gloves are holding and operating a Fluke 1770-Series Power Logger.

Monitoring power consumption equips you with the data needed to make important energy management decisions. Knowing your energy usage is critical to understanding the capacity of your existing electrical panel, troubleshooting circuit breaker trips, identifying energy costs, and uncovering energy waste. It can help you to maximise plant safety, decrease and verify bills while increasing energy efficiency, secure rebates and financial incentives, and locate and troubleshoot power quality issues.[1]

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Reason 1: Plant Safety

Ensuring that your circuit has the capacity to accommodate an additional load is essential to maintaining plant safety and adhering to local safety regulations. Using a Fluke 1770-Series Power Logger, you can document existing load levels (three-phase current draw) over time to determine whether adding a new draw would or would not overload an existing electrical source.

Reason 2: Improve Energy Efficiency & Reduce Energy Costs

Logging power use helps you to verify how much energy is being used and when it is being used, which loads/supplies are drawing the most energy, and how much that power is costing you. This data will often highlight areas of energy wastage that can be easily and quickly addressed by, for example, turning-off loads such as lights and equipment that are not in use, reducing loads during peak rate periods, and/or adjusting the schedule so that loads operate during non-peak rate periods. Moreover, having a detailed record of your power consumption is helpful when comparing energy expenditure to your operations as you can easily see whether your monthly bill is within range.

Reason 3: Ensure Electricity Bills Are Correct

As mentioned above, using a Fluke 1770-Series Power Quality Analyser to assess power consumption can help you to verify the accuracy of your electricity bill. This is a particularly useful function for landlords who own large properties that are sub-divided into flats. In these situations, landlords often install electrical submeters to bill tenants for their specific energy use. Fluke’s 1770-Series Portable Energy Logger provides an easy method of double-checking these bills as logged data can be used to estimate a tenant’s expenditure. If the estimation deviates significantly from what the tenant is being charged, this may indicate that there is a problem with the sub-meter.

Reason 4: Rebates & Financial Incentives

To avoid building new power generation plants, some utility companies offer financial incentives and rebates to customers who have decreased their energy use by retrofitting buildings with, for example, energy-efficient lighting and high-efficiency motors, and/or have replaced motor starters with variable frequency drives. However, in order to claim rebates and/or access financial incentives, often customers must provide proof of energy savings. Portable energy loggers, such as Fluke’s 1770-Series, are the ideal tools for gathering this evidence. They can be used to conduct a pre-retrofit load study, which captures the customer’s existing power consumption, and then a post-retrofit load study which will record data that proves energy savings.

Reason 5: Diagnose Power Quality Issues

Capturing and analysing data over a prolonged period using a Fluke 1770-Series Power Logger is an economical and easy way of troubleshooting complex issues. For instance, it is impractical for a maintenance technician to monitor a load continuously in order to determine why a circuit breaker is randomly tripping. However, connecting a portable energy logger, such as a Fluke 1770-Series Power Quality Analyser, to the load side of the circuit breaker means you can record the current draw over time, helping you to diagnose the cause.

Further Information

For more information about monitoring power consumption and/or the Fluke 1770-Series Power Loggers, please contact our sales team on 01642 931 329 or via our online form.

In the meantime, please browse our complete selection of power quality analysers, including models by Fluke.

[1] Information for this blog was gathered using the following source: