How to measure how much electricity you use in kWh

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Posted by Felix Okoli on Thursday February 25, 2016 at 17:14:41:

A lot of people in Nigeria use electricity or a variety of reasons and many of them pay bills on a monthly basis. With the recent introduction and gradual deployment of prepaid electricity meters, Nigerians are now allowed to also pay bills on a prepaid basis which works a bit like GSM services.

The unit of electricity in Nigeria is KiloWatt-Hours expressed as kWh and it refers to the amount of power consumed over a time based period. Let's assume that you've consumed 20 kWh, then it means that you've used 20 kilowatts per hour or 2 kilowatts in 10 hours. So, kWh is just the product of a multiplication between Power(kW) and time(Hours). A kilowatt is equivalent to 1000 Watts and Watts is the unit for Power.

I recently purchased electricity credit from my Power company(PHCN) since I used a prepaid meter and it was for the sum of N5000. When I loaded the meter token it came with, my Prepaid meter got credited with about 180 kWh since the tariff for electricity now is about N25 and there is also a VAT of 5% deducted from my payment. For me, it's easy to know how much electricity I will use in a month or a day just by taking a look at my Prepaid meter reading.

If you have a post paid electricity meter installed, you can also easily read your electricity consumption by looking at your meter reading at specific starting and stopping points.

So, one way to know how much electricity that you use in Nigeria is by taking a look at your electricity meter reading and recording the reading within a specific time frame. You can know how much electricity you've consumed or will consume by reading it over a specific time frame such as 1 hr or 3 hrs. Reading from your main electricity meter will allow you to know how much power your home or office uses as a whole.

What if you want to know how much electricity a specific device consumes? Well, you can do that by making use of an indoor electricity usage monitor. A Kill A Watt meter is a good example of an electricity usage monitor and it is like a plug that you can use with your wall socket which allows you to plug in the electrical device you want to measure it's electricity usage. It will display readings on its screen showing how much electricity has been consumed by that device over a time period. It can help you know which of your electrical devices consume the most or least electricity and hence allows you to make the right decision.

To measure your electricity usage, just read your meter reading or usage monitor and note how many units is displayed. It will normally be expressed in kWh unless otherwise stated. Read it from a start and a stop point and during when you have pwower supply and that can be for or 2 hrs. That would now allow you to estimate how many units of electricity you will consume assuming your have 24 hrs of electrical power supply for up to 30 days or so.

Knowing your electricity usage and need can help you manage devices that use the most electricity and also helps you plan for the future by knowing how much electricity you actually need for it to be a 24 hrs supply. So, if you consumed 5 kWh of electricity in 2 hrs, then it means that you would need about 60 kwH of electricity per day to power the same number of electrical devices you used for those initial 2 hrs.

Given the rising cost and unreliability of grid electricity in Nigeria, it's only sensible that people should start thinking of alternative ways to power their homes that could be cheaper such as generators, solar power, wind power and so on.

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Comments:

Re: How to measure how much electricity you use in kWh Reply by Modupe on Friday December 30, 2016 at 4:15:6:

Hi. I'm trying to understand your calculation above.
If I consumer 5KWh in 2 hrs, shouldn't that come to 60KWh in 24hrs? Any reason why the figure is doubled?

Re: How to measure how much electricity you use in kWh Reply by Felix Okoli on Friday December 30, 2016 at 4:15:6:

Thanks, I've made the correction