How To Read Your Meter

Reading your electric meter is a good way to know how much you're spending on electricity. Here in the Tennessee Valley our residential rates are among the lowest in the country. And together with your local power company, we'll continue to keep those rates low, while offering more competitive and more energy efficient ways to use that electricity.
Electricity is measured in kilowatt-hours. As sort of a quick reference, a 100 watt light bulb burning for 10 hours uses one kilowatt-hour. Electric meters keep track of how many kilowatt-hours you've used. There are two kinds of electric meters, digital and dial. Both are pretty easy to read and understand once you get the hang of it.

The Digital Meter

Ready for this? All you have to do is read the meter like the mileage odometer in your car. What could be easier? Every time the number increases, that's another kilowatt-hour used. Simple.

 

 

The Dial Meter

This is the tricky one. On a dial meter, there are five dials, numbered 0 through 9, with the 0 at the top. Look closely and you'll see that the numbers go around the face clockwise on some of the dials, but counterclockwise on every other dial.

The hands of the dials move in the same direction as the counting order of the numbers. To read the meter, just write down the number that each hand has just passed. Start with the dial on the far left, and proceed to the right.

 

 

The reading is 66,649.
If a hand is directly on a number, look at the dial to its immediate right. If that hand has passed zero, write down the number that the left hand is pointing to.

 

The reading here is 70.If the hand on the right has not passed zero, write down the last number that the left hand has passed.

 

 Here, the reading is 69.

So, now what?

Once you know how to read your meter, it's easy to figure out how much electricity you've used since your last electric bill. Simply look at last month's electric bill to find the reading recorded by your local power company. Then, subtract last month's reading from the number you just took off your meter. What you end up with is the total number of kilowatt-hours you've used since your last reading.

Where does it go?

The biggest electricity consumption in your home is from your heating and air conditioning equipment. The average home uses about 55 percent of its electricity here. Older, less insulated homes use even more electricity. Older appliances are less energy efficient, and cost more to run, too. Water heaters are usually the second-largest user of electricity in your home. After that come major appliances like refrigerators, stoves, washers, and dryers, followed by smaller items like TVs, lamps, and stereos.