At Summit station we are using National Meter Industries, Inc. K4000 and KW4000 series meters, mostly the K4240.
At Barrow Larry Levine has installed a Square DPowerlogic Energy Meter: "We installed one of these meters in the BEO Generator Module at Barrow a few weeks ago. It was a Square D POWERLOGIC EMB2010 Energy Meter, 120/240V w/ 2 100A CTs. The unit cost $309.00 w/ CTs from Graybar Electric in Anchorage, AK. Attached is the product info sheet from Square D. Also here’s a link to the power meters on the Powerlogic site. http://www.powerlogic.com/products.cfm?id=19."
Larry and I (Andrew) have discussed moving to the Square D units. I find the documentation for the National Meter units sparse, and I continually see checksum errors on the RS-485 wire.
These are good meters for generator power systems. For battery based systems my favorite off the shelf unit is the "Trimetric" meter, which is available from most RE retailers. This meter gives a wide range of parameters more unique to battery based systems, including instantaneous voltage, amps in/out, % full, etc. It is also a totalizing meter. The down side is that it does have a largish display that takes some power to run, so it is not compatible with the smallest of autonomous power systems. TD July 1, 2006
