Hey everyone, figured I'd post here to ask, I've recently started exploring the world of lost pla metal casting, and I picked up an old kiln that I'm going to refurbish and convert to PID controls to use as a burn out oven, and maybe for ceramic casting medium baking as well.
This is a 240v unit that hooks up with a stove/dryer connector, I'll be replacing the cable with a longer one as well, but it means that since I'm replacing all the old mechanical controls, it gives me the chance to do some other neat stuff and measuring power use is one that I want to do.
There are all sorts of cheap power meters on amazon that use an inductive clamp and would work fine for most things, however since this using both 120v lines as well as neutral, from what I understand, I'll need to measure the current on both of the live connections to get the true power usage, and the neutral is just an imbalanced return that I think can be ignored?
So, I'm in search of a hopefully cheap panel mount power monitor that uses inductive sensors, and combines the total power use.
This is something that I could do with an arduino fairly easily, however I wouldn't mind having something that looks a little more polished than a 16x2 lcd.
I suppose worst case I order two of those ~$20 power meters and just add up the usage, but a single unit solution would be neater.