Dirty Electric
How would I know or test if a generator was putting out the wrong frequency or "dirty" electricity? (recently changed oil, new plug, new air filter, cleaned out carburetor best I could... wondering...
Forum Discussion
wa8yxm wrote:2112 wrote:Gdetrailer wrote:Close. This scope has 50V pk input. You would either need a 10X probe or a step down transformer such as THIS to protect the input. That will cost you another $10. I use the transformer for isolation as well. I just wanted readers to be aware another component would be required.
$50 says you are wrong.
120V RMS is about 170V pk so you would expect to measure 17V pk using this transformer. 60Hz would be 16.66 mS pk to pk.
I have one of those... A good scope will show you waveform. Not sure yet how good that one is.. It was "Good enough" for my specific need but not sure how good it would be for your need.
A Kill-A-Watt is about 1,000 worth of meters in a 20-30 dollar box. ONE of the meters is frequency.
Also some multi-meters (like my Crafstman clamp on AC/DC job) do frequency.
Kill-O-watt is a nice device, but it doesn't give or show distortion, it will also have a small delay in frequency reading and voltage Kill-O-watt uses a "sampling" over time method and averages the samples to come up with a result with periodic updates.
"O" scope has zero delay, you will see the waveform change with distortion, voltage and frequency change all real time..
Not working with rocket science here, this is very basic 60HZ AC Sinewave theory. Distortion of the sinewave waveform means you have distortion which can be caused by AVR, gen head speed or in this case a gen inverter failure..
But my point was you do not need a stand alone $1,000+ THD meter to see if the gen output has distortion, noise, wrong voltage or is off frequency.
