All About Meters

Smart Meters

With a smart meter installed at your home, you can learn about your energy consumption, calculate your costs, monitor your usage and track your savings.

Reading Your AMS Smart Meter:

Your Advanced Metering System Smart Meter offers near-real-time usage data that helps you gain control over your electricity costs. The meter’s screen displays three types of information.

  • The status of your electricity service. OPN means the electricity is off. CLS means the electricity is on.

  • Your electricity usage for the billing period. This shows your cumulative electricity usage in kilowatt hours (kWh) up to the current billing period. This is also the number that appears on your bill, so tracking the changes on a daily, weekly or monthly basis will show you how your energy saving efforts are making an impact.

  • Your electricity demand reading.This number is used by the Transmission and Distribution Utility to gauge the amount of electricity being used at any particular time.

Analog Meters

Reading your electric meter on a monthly basis can help you verify the amount of electricity that you are using and monitor your energy saving efforts.

Here's how to do it:

  • Read the dials from right to left. Dial one must make a full revolution before dial two can move one space.

  • Write down the number that the pointer has just passed, not the number that it is moving towards. Read the first dial clockwise, the second dial counterclockwise, and continue to alternate from dial to dial. If the pointer appears to be directly on a number, the only way to be sure it has reached that number is whether the dial to the right has completed its revolution or passed zero.

  • Write the numbers down from left to right, to get the total kilowatt-hours registered on the meter. To determine usage for the month, subtract the previous month's reading from this month's reading.

  • Just like the odometer of a car, the register turns over after the last dial on your meter has completed a full revolution (100,000 kilowatt-hours on a five-dial meter). Each time the meter turns over, a "1" must be added in front of the next reading in order to compute the number of kilowatt-hours used.