wow we're not used to seeing the Wago name up in lights we normally associate Wago with high
quality screwless connectors but today we're going to look at a new product for us it's these
mid energy meters from wago .energy is bit of a hot topic gary hot topic hot topic energy prices have
gone through the roof and you know the old saying if you can measure it you can manage it so we
installed one behind us and our Lewden and TopTer board but what did we do that for yeah well
it came along just in time actually because we're going to explore one of the dirty secrets of
ev charging and to do that we're going to need to know how much energy does it actually take to
charge an ev so watch out for that video coming along there may be a few surprises in there for
ev owners and infrastructure providers um but i guess let's have a look at the meter
itself here we go so as you'd expect from wago incredibly easy to install because we've got
screwless connectors throughout so this meter does not need external current clamps so you can
you can power up to 65 amps through this meter so i'll just and as you'd expect because of
that there are some quite chunky terminals along the bottom here but here's a conventional solid meter
tail so this is 25 millimeter squared and that's the largest size it can accept yep so that just
pushes into the cage clamp and then we've got a great connection there i can repeat the process
with a flexible tri-rated cable here but i've put a uh uninsulated ferrule on there so this is 16
millimeter squared and again you can just push that into the cage clamp the only time i need
to lift the levers was if i was using a flexible conductor so again lift the lever pop it in there
and then it's down i notice that they're all in a line there so we've got l1 l1 l2 o2 and l3 l3 for
our connections which is pretty common to a meter isn't it yeah so there's two versions so this one
we're all the connections for the main power at the bottom the one we've installed in the panel
behind us has the power flowing through the meter so a set of connections at the bottom and at the
top to remove the conductors obviously you still do have to lift the levers up and again that's a
simple process but i think the speed of connection and then you'll notice it's a nice clear design
there it is it's great obviously it shows off the electronics inside but you can also see the strip
length for the conductors on the terminal block as well by looking at the cytometer so 19 millimeters
in this case when i think of metering i think of the potential maybe that if this was used
in a process i could bypass me easily lift these levers and join them together and actually not be
measuring any of the energy oh that's uh that's a dishonest of you gary so these are mid meters
which is the measuring instrument directive um so there's a set of standards that meet us have
to comply this particular if you're going to use them for billing and as part of that they do have
to have a cover so this cover obviously stops to get into the terminals and through here you
can put a lead seal um so you can tell if it's been tampering interesting as well in the uh
in the metering in the data you can get out of the meat you can also tell how many times it's
been powered down as well all right okay so if you kept kept kept an eye on that you might be able to
spot some nefarious uh tampering going on in there so we've got that information we're reading our
energy okay and we now wanna obviously manage that energy so we need to send it somewhere can we send
that information to a bms system uh yes you can so you'll notice there's more terminals on the top
this meter again all screwless terminals so this way you'd connect to a bms system using modbus or
mbus to a higher level energy management system so perhaps you're collecting the data from lots
of different different machines or panel boards um to obviously build up a profile for a whole
building to see what's going on we didn't use that here we used bluetooth didn't we there was a qr
code in order that we could read on our device the information that's stored within that meter
can you talk me through this bluetooth connection okay really simple there's some touch sensitive
buttons at the bottom of the meter so hold the middle one down for three seconds touch
again brings up a qr code so now i can open up the wago energy meter app i could also connect with a
regular bluetooth scan at this point but i'm going to take a photograph of that qr code via the app
so that's dead simple there we go recognize the qr code so now i can look at the values in the meter
so let's look at the recorded energy so you can see there what we've been using in a
kilowatt hour oh there's negative flow there for some reason we'll come back to that i'm sure
but then you can see energy buffers you can look at reactive energy and you can capture all of
that so this is obviously historic this is what the meat has been reading so there is a lot of
information certainly more than you can display on that display there is a lot of information
on the display but again this this app gives you granular detail about what's going on in the meter
i could then export it so save and export that as a csv file and i can see i could what's that back
to you gary you could analyze that in detail i'd let you keep that information if that's okay yeah
so i'm just going to save that and then let's have a look at the instantaneous energy values
so we can go in there so now we can see our line voltage so aligned to neutral voltage the current
per power per fares reactive power professional this is useful if you're going to do some power
quality analysis uh check your phases are balanced and obviously this can give you some telltale
signs possibly if something's wrong uh obviously if you're tracking this over a period of time
so again we can scan through that as a lot of information even your phase-to-phase voltages
there as well in the all-important power factor again we can save and export this if we wanted
to as well so again just i could save that file to desktop if i just wanted to analyze that a little
bit later we can also access the settings within the meter itself so say we wanted to set up that
modbus connection we can go in there and alter the specific parameters for that so the communication
rate and there's where you can see that power down counter as well so you can see how many times the
the meter has been powered down so you might be looking for tampering or
evidence of power cuts since you've lasted a uh a meter read so again useful functions in there
go back out there oh there you go you can see the part number and you know i love a part
number and you can also see the serial number which is mirrored in the display on the meter
as well so you can obviously check that you're reading the meter that you expect to be reading
when i was looking at those readings it looked remarkably like we were exporting power we got the
ability to go from car to grid gordon not quite yet gary it was just the excitement uh after the
weekend of doing the first install of this meter and actually put it around the wrong way and hence
you'll see a negative power floor however i do think that then demonstrates the fact that this
meter can measure both positive and negative power flow so if you've got micro generation
built into the installation you can capture that and record it you can also have multiple tariff
inputs to it so there's two tariff inputs on the top so say you had an off-peak energy profile
that you want to measure separately you can do that and you can access another two
using the bms if you're set up to do that as well so some again more powerful features
i think you styled out of that one nice it easily fits on that din rail and we can see the levers
obviously because you've made the error i would suggest obviously the levers mean you just have
to pop them out and return the terminals into the correct order yeah it was quick to correct quick
to correct the error and again that's the benefit of these screwless connectors people obviously
thinking well this is 65 amps we can handle directly through this meter what if you want
to go higher than that you can also get a version of this meter that it will work with external one
or five amp current transformers if you've got a bigger distribution board to measure and that's
where probably a lot of viewers may have seen this we have covered energy management on the channel
before and some people just didn't get the whole concept but actually getting to grips with energy
can make a massive cost difference to to any business in a commercial electricians
are probably used to seeing this in sub boards particularly where floor meters are above 500
meters squared and a thousand meters squared as part of part l if this is a whole new concept for
you we have got a cpd on that topic that looks at energy management with regards to lighting
in more detail okay that's fantastic but i've also seen them recently when i popped down to park erin
where we looked at the house of the future that actually had metering i think it was
four or five meters in there metering everything at a granular level what's the thinking on that
yeah so that yeah again that was the first time we'd seen three phase in a domestic installation
and they had put an enormous amount of metering in there all interconnected so they could remotely
understand at a granular level where the energy flow is going in that property now whether that
rolls out on mass scales and we'll see lots more metering at a domestic level remains to be seen
but they'd used a full functionalities of meters including that remote communication
to get to grips with it and that comes back to it doesn't it if you can measure it you can
manage it and they were measuring it every single point so they can reduce the energy
and we know how important it is we go into a fully electric world we believe so therefore knowing
how much electricity you're using is vitally important in order to keep the cost down isn't it
so let us know what you think have you installed this meter what how do you think it compares to
other ones on the market is energy monitoring a whole new field that you'd like to get into
obviously put those comments below and we'll try and get back to as many as we can