I already understood that in order to monitor a three-phase electricity supply, I'll require two additional current clamps. My (simple) question is whether I'll be able to track electricity consumption per phase or will this be combined into 1 'overall' consumption number? The reason I'm asking is that we are struggling with a 3x400V+N supply with a general circuit breaker limited to 3x16A which basically means that a little too much load on a single phase just makes for 'lights out' in the whole house (no individual circuit breaker ever gets triggerred...) It would be really nice to be able to build some 'warning' mechanism when we come too close to the allowed limit.
Out of my own experience...NO
you have it as "1" number...
Hi Gerg,
We connect the three clamps in series and feed the resulting signal to the Fluksometer. We monitor the three phases collectively. Now, if you would be interested in analysing your per-phase load, you could connect only one clamp to a specific phase wire at a time. This might help you to better analyse individual phases and balance your loads across the three phases, reducing circuit breaker triggering.
Regarding your use of a Fluksometer as an early warning system: I don't think this use case will work. When a load requires electrical power, the current drawn in one of your phases (or all three in case of a 3-phase connection) will increase instantaneously. Your circuit breaker will be triggered instantaneously as well. Don't compare this to a car engine where the rpm ramps up gradually. You can really observe this on the Flukso charts. Some loads (especially heating ones like a cooking plate, dishwasher heating cycle, clothes dryer) will show up as a pulse-like curve. They do not ramp up their electricity use gradually over several minutes. Within the span of a second your current might jump from a couple of milliamps to several amps. The earliest warning signal you will get is a circuit breaker being triggered.
HTH,
Bart.
Many thanks for the detailed reply and apologies for my late 'thank you'.