Remember when Sam took the clamp meter to his setup? I’ve been wondering if I’m using mine right. I know on the DC side, you’re supposed to only get a single lead, but if you’re grabbing a power cable to check the AC current, that’s going to include both hot and neutral, and in most cases a gfc, so is the meter taking that into account, or is it really expecting you to strip it down to the lines?
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You need to only put in a single wire, otherwise the magnetic field is canceled out by the current that goes back through the second wire.
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In my old flat I had this project running, where I measured the electricity of the whole flat and had a kind of live monitoring. Three clamps were needed, because of the three phases and I also had a wall plug to measure voltage.
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The meter works like a transformer. The primary side is one of the leads that connect the power to the load, the secondary side is the meter that measures the voltage across the secondary and displays it converted to a current value on the meter. Note that with AC-current this works nicely because a transformer’s principle working is based on AC currents. If you want to measure DC current with a clamp, you need a specialized device as explained here.
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Yeah, my clamp has both AC and DC modes-I made sure of that before I bought it.