Explanation of Watts capability on new Fieldpiece SC680. Or at least my best attempt.

you can measure hertz through the amp clamp and through your test leads at the same time which gives us the ability to compare phase angle which is something we've not been able to do unless we buy a three thousand dollar scope meter or something this allows us to do that which enables not just the watts that we have here but reactive watts or volt amps reactive and apparent power. Now I'm going to post a picture of the power triangle that shows the true power which is on the bottom and that's what we normally measure with our amp meters but what our power company sees is the apparent power. We can now measure that. As you see here this is watts that's just a voltage times amps and up here is a power factor that's a ratio of the real power divided by apparent power the closer you get to one the closer it is to linear power and the more true power is being applied but what else we can measure this VAR is volt amps reactive this is reactive power this is power that reacts with the incoming voltage and draws up the amp draw on the building okay now i'm going to show that picture so you see what i'm talking about so the real amp draw that the power company sees is this and as you see the volt amps is the same thing as wattage but with a power factor of 0.66 it's 254 but the real power which is what's being consumed by this piece of equipment is right at a hundred 150 170 watts so there's a difference there's a difference in the power that the electric company sees this piece of equipment using in the power that we have normally been able to measure now we can measure a power factor which gives us the ability to measure not just volt amps reactive but the apparent power and i'll show that picture again if i can but um this is why this has an ECM motor and you see the power factor is close is over 0.5 the best you can get is 0.1 a resistive load like heat strips gives you a power factor of one which means all the power being supplied is being converted into work this means that all the power being supplied is not being converted into work some of it's being reacted with with back EMF capacitors and transformers such things like that but before we've never been able to measure stuff like that with this new SC680 and i think the 480 we can measure this and we can also use these numbers to calculate the SEER rating on a piece of equipment so it's a real nice addition to a meter that i wasn't willing to invest three thousand dollars to be able to read but i can read it on this it's a lot nicer once again real power is what we measure wattage what the equipment consumes reactive is what reacts with the power coming in and apparent power is what the power company sees us using.