Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Does anyone know how accurate the campy things that measure amps are?

I cant see how they can be accurate when they don't know how thick the insulation on the wire is. ie they cant know how far away the thing they are measuring is.

I'd never met a clamp metre until a few days ago when I spent some days on a friends paddle boat on the River Murray. We were talking about his LED lighting and solar system, and he checked the wattage of the kitchen light with the clampy thing and it seemed to be pretty accurate. (based on what we both expected)

By the way, he runs a fridge around twice the size of a typical hotel room fridge, and a freezer about the same size, plus all lights and instrumentation on a boat that normally sleeps two, but has beds for 8 and does it all on 320 watts of solar and 400 amp hours of battery. In the 6 days/nights total I've spent on the boat, I've never seen the batteries show less than 12.5v. (no air-con but there's a wood heater, and cool river always at hand)

It seems there's no need for the grid if you live on a boat.

I'm trying to convince him to drop an aquaponics garden onto his roof to use some of his excess power.

Anyway, are they accurate for measuring things like the power used by my 12v DC trolling motor? (speed 3 of 5 is in excess of the 10 amps my multimeter will read so I have never been able to tell what it uses at maximum power)

Hi Mr B
Missed you!
Mr G says they measure the axial magnetic flow and are accurate to +/- 1%
Insulation thickness does not matter.
Be careful how you speak to Mr G. He kept wanting to tell me about,’nipple clamps’????
Whatever they are!

Thanks Titus