The electric meters do measure current and display this measure integrated over time.Lucky Lucan wrote: ↑Thu Jul 09, 2020 10:11 pmSo V12, considering you seem to know what you are talking about when it comes to electrical supply and meters, what is causing this giant surge in billing?
What you pay for is "Energy", IE the product of Current and Voltage and running time (and some more tech things, though that does not change that much, see below).
It is assumed, the Voltage is 230 V. If the Voltage goes down, the effectively delivered Energy is lower than when the Voltage would be 230 V.
The Voltage * Current do give the "Power". Multiply with the running time and you get the amount of Energy, effectively how much you pay to EDC.
To cool down your fridge, a certain amount of Energy (Power * running time) is needed. So, IF the Voltage goes down, the delivered Power goes down and as well the Energy per time unit.
To reach the same amount of Energy to cool down your fridge, the running time goes up.
Because the Electric meter does simply measure Current multiplied by time, it is only an assumption of the delivered Energy. As long as the Voltage is constant at 230 V, that assumption is fine, but especially in countries like Cambodia, the Voltage is far from constant.
The non-constant Voltage does work in 2 ways: Higher Voltage, then you get more Energy from EDC without having paid for it. Lower, then you get less Energy for the amount you pay to EDC, IE you pay to much.
Higher Voltage is not always an advantage, because it can burn out your TV, computers, electric motors, etc. Low Voltage can also give damages, because the Current drawn tends to go up (this is due to the non-linear behavior of electronics and electric things in general).
IF the Voltage was higher last year (for example 250-260 V) and is now lower (for example 200 V), that'll make 20-25% in billed amount.
And with the secondary effect, that, once the Voltage of electric motors goes below a certain minimum amount these motors need to run properly, the motor starts drawing extra current, assume some 20%.
So, bottom line, the bill can easily increase some 40-50%, based on the Voltage circumstances.
Add hot weather and the bill can go up further.
All the keystone cops pictures showing the metering is OK does only show a measuring of the current (effectively what the electric meters do rely on -and subsequently integrate over time).
The handheld current meters do have probably some calculation mode build in to integrate the current over time, to get to the digits the electric meters also do show.
So, all in all, what the keystone cops show with their current measuring device does not prove anything about the energy amount, only that the electric meter is working properly.
It could even be, EDC did upgrade some equipment (voltage converters, IE transformers, those big things in the electric poles that sometime get on fire), for better versions, which give a netter stable Voltage and/or less distortion on the AC (Alternating Current) delivered to their customers. The latter resulting in the electric meter showing a higher reading for the same amount of Energy delivered (or better, the reading was too low in the past). This is caused by the phase difference between Voltage and Current (both do alternate, but can be more or less out of perfect sync).
So, what is surging these bills is difficult to say, for that, it needs history data about the Voltage (probably not available), current Voltage data and information about the phase aspects.
What is quite certain is, that the keystone cops proving actions (at least what I did see on the pictures, they only measure Current, not Voltage) does prove nothing, other than the correct electric meter readings. Which is not that strange, because those meters tend to be quite robust.