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Where do I clip my energy monitor if at all

lordswood
lordswood Posts: 46 Forumite
Part of the Furniture 10 Posts Combo Breaker
edited 28 October 2019 at 12:51PM in Energy
We have a large house with Economy 7 for night storage heaters and immersion heater. As we use over 20,000kwh a year, when I was offered an energy monitor I grabbed it as I have become suspicious of our meter's accuracy as we rarely use more than two storage heaters in the winter.

Space is tight in our meter cupboard so I attached the monitor to the most accessible cable which happened to be the black labelled one.
Monitor readings were consistently high as I expected, but what has really confused me is that with all the economy seven driven appliances off, the night-time meter reading showed we were using 3.5kwh at night compared to 1.7kwh during the day whilst asleep - no cooking, no TV (2), no computers(2) no heating and no lighting.

Going back to the instructions I read that the monitor clip should be attached to the cable labelled L or red, so I managed to get the clip onto that cable. Now the readings have dropped by 2/3, but things like the cooker, heaters and other high usage units don't register at all if plugged in in certain parts of the house. If I turn off circuit breakers to some parts of the house the monitor doesn't even notice.

If an electrical engineer reads this perhaps you can tell me what's going on and does it mean a monitor won't work on my set-up. There are two other cables to try, but they're even less accessible.
Am I just not going to be able to use the monitor to check my meter?

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