How to read electricity meter – older style clockface type

Calculating your energy use in daytime hours

Before installing a solar system, it can be useful to understand how much energy is used in your home across the daylight hours.

It’s a simple process of recording the reading at an early point in the day – say 7am/8am – and then recording the reading again at sunset (say 6pm).  Subtracting the morning reading from the (higher) afternoon reading will give you the kilowatt-hours used across the day. This daytime energy use total will normally be a figure between 4 and 20 units for a typical family.

However, some customers have advised us that it is difficult to get information on reading these meters.

How to read clockface electricity meters

Let’s look at the dials on the meter:

Your meter may or may not have a red (or lightly coloured) dial for 1/10th of a kilowatt-hour. We normally don’t worry about it too much.

To read the dial, look at the arrow’s position between the numbers. The reading is simply the smallest of those two numbers, or the number it is directly over. On the right hand side, the arrow is between the 3 and the 4, so the reading is 3.

Note: each dial tends to spin in a different direction

Let’s see a worked example of that:

The reading of the meter is 74958  

You can also watch a video on meters generally, and how to read your meter: