How to Read Your Electrical Meter to Monitor Your Home’s Energy Usage

In order to read your home’s electrical meter, you’ll need to find it. Look for your electric meter in these common places: 

• Foundation: Electrical meters may sit near the foundation of the home or building where the main electrical wiring enters. 

• Indoors: Some electrical power meters are inside the home, usually near your electrical circuit breaker box. Look in a utility room, a porch, a garage, or a basement.

• Power pole: If your property has an electrical pole somewhere near it, the pole may contain a mount with the meter. Typically, you’d find this type of pole near an alley.

• Light pole: If you live in a rural area or on an acreage, you may have a safety light pole on the property. The power company may mount your meter directly to this pole, as it often also carries the main electric line to the home.

• Cluster of meters: If you live in a multi-family building or work in a multi-tenant commercial building, the electric meters for each unit may be together in one place on the property. Check near a parking area, near any air conditioning units, in a shared utility room, in a basement, or mounted to a nearby power pole.

If you cannot find your meter, call the power company. It should be able to tell you the exact location of the meter for your property.

An older electric meter has dials on it that sort of resemble multiple clock faces. These dials have only 10 digits and one hand, though. As your home draws power through the electric meter, the meter uses hidden gears to move the hand on each dial.

These dials measure the number of kilowatt hours (kWh) of power you are using. 

Some dials’ hands spin counter-clockwise, while others spin clockwise, which can complicate the process of how to read the electrical meter. When reading the dials, just focus on the location of the hand, rather than worrying about which direction it spins. 

If the hand points between two digits, write down the lower of the two digits. 

If the hand seems to be pointing directly at a digit, look at the next dial to the right. If the hand on that dial is between eight and zero, count the previous dial on the left as the next smallest digit, rather than the digit at which it’s pointing. 

If the hand on the dial to the right is pointing directly at zero or is between zero and two, write down the digit at which the hand on the dial to the left seems to be pointing.

Write down the numbers on the dials in the same order you see them on the face of the meter.

A digital electric meter is far easier to read than a meter with dials. It has a display screen that shows the amount of power you use at your home in kWh. 

Just write down the numbers in the order in which they appear.

Once you have your electrical meter numbers written down, it’s time to make sense of them. Understand that the number on the meter reflects the total amount of power you used since the power company installed the meter. The meter does not reset to zero each billing period.

• Calculating power usage: If you want to calculate your power usage over a period of time, write down the meter numbers at the start of the period and at the end of the period. Subtract the start-of-period number from the end-of-period number to see how many kWh you used in the period. You can use this information to try to track your efforts at conserving power, for example.

• Submitting to the power company: Some electric companies require customers to track and submit their meter numbers each month for billing purposes. Write them on the paper bill or submit them to your account on the power company’s website.

If the power company doesn’t require you to submit your numbers, you may have a smart meter, which transmits the numbers automatically to the power company. You also may have a meter reader who visits your location.