You will find a meter box located at your home, local businesses and your school.
Inside every meter box there is a meter which reads the amount of electricity used.
Meters are read every two months by a Horizon Power staff member and the reading is used to calculate your family’s electricity bills.
The amount of electricity your family uses is measured in kilowatt hours (kWh). One kWh equals 1000 watts of power used in one hour.
Your appliances and light bulbs require different amounts of watts to work. The higher the number of watts, the more electricity it uses. For example, a 500 watt iron turned on for two hours would use one kilowatt hour or one unit of electricity.
Horizon Power uses three types of meters:
electro-mechanical dial meters
electro-mechanical digital meters
electronic digital meters
Mechanical Dial Meters
Clock-face dial meters have four, five or six dials, which alternate in direction.
To read these meters:
stand directly in front of the meter.
start from the right, read each dial and write down the figures.
when a dial hand points between two numbers, write down the lower number of the two.
for example, the reading in the diagram is 2-7-0-3-8 which is 27,038 kilowatt hours (units).
Electronic Digital Meters
The electronic digital display meters have a six-digit display similar to the odometer of cars. To read these meters you simply write down the figures that are displayed.
A bi-directional meter is a special type of electronic digital meter as it’s designed to measure electricity flow in two directions.
Horizon Power is in the process of replacing all home and business meters with bi-directional meters. By upgrading the old meters with this new technology it will allow homes and businesses to more easily install renewable energy systems.