How Measure Electricity Made Simple - Even Your Kids Can Do It

How to measure Your Electricity?

We are thinking about measuring electricity today, did you know that Ben Franklin helped us learn about electricity over 250 years ago? Even though we cannot see electricity, this does not mean that we cannot measure it. In fact, performing measurements is often the only way to tell whether electricity is actually flowing through a wire. Have you ever heard of a volt, an amp, or a watt? Do you know the difference between voltage, current and power?

Photo: You can use a digital multi-meter to measure voltage, current, and resistance.

Fear? Not If You Use How to Measure Electricity The Right Way!

We can measure electricity in a number of different ways, but a few measurements are particularly important.

How Measure Voltage

An electromotive force or potential difference expressed in volts. The voltage is a kind of electrical force that makes electricity move through a wire and we measure it in volts. 

In brief, voltage = pressure, and it is measured in volts (V). The bigger the voltage means the bigger the force, the more current will tend to flow. So a 6-volt battery cell will generally produce more current than a 1.5-volt t battery cell.

How Measure Current

Sponsored:

A flow of electricity which results from the ordered directional movement of electrically charged particles. 

Voltage does not, itself, go anywhere: it's quite wrong to talk about voltage "flowing through" things. Current is a flow of electrical charge carriers, usually electrons or electron-deficient atoms. 

The common symbol for current is the uppercase letter “I”. What moves through the wire in a circuit from negative to positive points is electrical current: a steady flow of electrons, measured in amperes (or amps).

How Measure Power

Together, voltage and current give you electrical power. The bigger the voltage and the bigger the current, the more electrical power you have. 

Electric power is the rate at which electric energy is transferred. Electric power is measured by capacity and is commonly expressed in megawatts (MW). 

A megawatt (MW) is one million watts, we measure electric power in units called watts. Something that uses 1 watt uses 1 joule of energy each second.

The electric power in a circuit is equal to the voltage × the current (in other words: watts = volts × amps). 

So if you have a 100-watt (100 W) light and you know your electricity supply is rated as 230 volts (typical household voltage in Bangladesh), the current flowing must be 100/230 = 0.44 amps. 

If you're in America, your household voltage is more likely 120 volts. So if you use the same 100-watt light, the current flowing is 100/120 = 0.8 amps.

How Measure Energy

Sponsored:

The amount of mains electrical energy transferred is measured in kilowatt-hours, kWh. One unit is 1 kWh. Meaning that power is measured in kilowatts here instead of the more usual watts. 

To convert from W to kW you must divide by 1,000. In easy interpretation- Power is a measurement of how much energy we are using each second. 

To find out the total amount of energy an electric appliance uses, we have to multiply the power it uses per second by the total number of seconds we use it for. The result we get is measured in units of power × time, often converted into a standard unit called the kilowatt hour (kWh).

Hope, you never be embarrassed by your how to measure electricity skills after reading the article and you can measure your energy consumption automatically with an energy monitor.