Flashing LED On Electricity Meter

If you have had an electricity meter installed in the last few years, and
certainly if you taken advantage of the feed in tarif to have a solar
PV installation, your electricity meter(s) will be electronic with an LED which
flashes.

The

rate

of

this

flashing

is

proportional

to

the

amount

of power passing through the meter, and so useful information is there to be

collected.
If you have a grid-tied renewable energy system with an export meter with
the flashing LED, then the rate of flashing can tell you when you
are exporting surplus electricity and also the amount of power which is
being exported. The information from just that LED can be used to set up
automatic

systems

Controller to

turn

similar
on

an

to

our Surplus

immersion

heating

Solar

PV

element

Immersion
or

household

appliances to use electricity immediately when it is generated instead of

exporting it and then having to pay to import electricity later in the day.

Pictured above as an example is an A100C single phase kWh meter which is

commonly installed in the UK. To the right hand side of the meter reading is a
small LED together with some writing as pictured below:

This type of meter will always be labelled in this way with a certain number
ofImp/kWh. Imp/kWh is short for Impressions per kWh (unit) of electricity
which passes through the meter where one impression is a brief flash of an
LED.
The majority of meters are labelled 1000 Imp/kWh which means that the LED
will flash 1000 times for each kWh of electricty which passes through. The
rate of the flashing of the LED tells you how much power is currently passing
through the meter.
For the meter in the photographs above, the label states 1000 Imp/kWh, so
the LED will flash 1000 times per unit of electricity. We can use that value of
1000 to estimate the power. If a constant 1000W (1kW) is going through the
meter, then in one hour (3600 seconds) the LED will flash 1000 times, so the
LED will flash once every 3600/1000 = 3.6 seconds. With a constant 3000W
(3kW) going through the meter, in one hour 3 kWh will pass through the
meter (3 x 1000 = 3000 flashes in 3600 seconds) so the LED will flash every
3600 / 3000 = 1.2 seconds.
It is more likely that you will want to measure the rate of flashing, and from
that calculate the power going through the meter. This can easily be
achieved

by

reversing

the

calculation

above

as

follows:

Power (kW) = 3600 (secs in 1hr) divided by (the seconds between

flashes * number of Imp/kWh printed on meter)

For example, if the LED flashes once every 5.2 seconds on a meter labelled
800 kWh, the power going through the meter at that time will be 3600 / (5.2
* 800) = 0.865 kW.
(To measure the number of seconds between flashes it is best to start timing
on a flash, and then time how long for 10 more flashes. Divide that time by
10 to get the average number of seconds per flash. Obviously this only works
if the power is constant if someone turns on the kettle half way through
your time measurement the results will not be valid.)
Sumber :
http://www.reuk.co.uk/wordpress/solar/flashing-led-on-electricity-meter/