I’m interested in building a home energy monitoring device and am having trouble locating some current clamps at an low price. Perhaps I just don’t know what to look for, but in my research there were many people who seemed to be interested in doing this sort of thing…
If someone can point me in the right direction for these kinds of things that would be great… I’d imagine 100-200A would be the way to go and while I’ve seen some on ebay that are similar to fluke clamp probes but I was hoping for something a little more component based / slimline…
so anyway - some supplies for some home energy monitoring would may be nice… that’s all… Thanks!
yes, I found current transformers on mouser and digikey that were about $26 for 100A capacities - however they weren’t clamp on. the clamp on transformers were significantly more expensive. I’m not about to pull the mains out of my box just to thread them thru the transformers, I’d much rather just clip something on there…
On that note, how do the hall effect current sensors work - since they’re only a few dollars each?
I’m interested in building a home energy monitoring device and am having trouble locating some current clamps at an low price. Perhaps I just don’t know what to look for, but in my research there were many people who seemed to be interested in doing this sort of thing…
A better search term might be “split-core current transformer”.
A home-made alternate might be to get some ferrite toroids about an inch in diameter, cut them in half (carefully, the ferrite is very brittle), wrap some wire around one half for the secondary, and then tape it back together around power lead. I have no idea how you could easily calibrate it. Probably not worth the effort.