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Has anyone any knowledge on earth leakage clamp meters.
As far as I can make out they are identical to a normal clamp meter only with greater resolution measuring down to milliamps rather than amps.What I dont really get is why we dont have them with 2 clamps..one to measure the live and one to measure the neutral..with the difference being the leakage going eslewhere ie to earth.
A circuit I was checking the other day..the measuring technique is supposedly to clamp the live and the neutral together showed 1.3 amps.......When I clamp the live just,its 0.64. amps and roughly the same with the neutral.0.67 amps......Conflicting results in my view....surely the leakage is the difference between live and neutral currents 0.03 ( 30ma) the circuit itself is supplying kit which the client hasn't given me permisson to isolate(so I cant do IR test)
 
I have one and it's in the shed and my memory aint what it used to be it has a switch for changing from Amps to mili Amps, nice bit of kit was expensive when I bought it, again my memory can't go back that far,
Di Log that's it, if you google " Earth leakage clamp meter" you can see for yourself £191+ might be tempted to flog mine for the right price, on second thoughts no I'll keep it for posterity.
 
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You could in theory use two normal clamp meters....if they're high enough resolution...... one on the L and one on the N and the difference in readings would be the leakage but firstly it's just making life difficult juggling two instruments, also clamp meters that measure load currents are rarely accurate enough to show miliamps and also the inaccuracies of two testers could compound giving an even less accurate result. The correct method is by using one earth leakage clamp meter around the L+N simultaneously.

Why not just measure the earth to see what's leaking to 'earth'?
That's what I do
If you mean clamping it around the CPC then you won't see any leakage current that's going to earth down parallel paths so it likely won't be an accurate test.
 
I have one and it's in the shed and my memory aint what it used to be it has a switch for changing from Amps to mili Amps, nice bit of kit was expensive when I bought it, again my memory can't go back that far,
Di Log that's it, if you google " Earth leakage clamp meter" you can see for yourself £191+ might be tempted to flog mine for the right price, on second thoughts no I'll keep it for posterity.

Is that your apprentice Pete ?
 
..the measuring technique is supposedly to clamp the live and the neutral together showed 1.3 amps.......When I clamp the live just,its 0.64. amps and roughly the same with the neutral.0.67 amps......Conflicting results in my view....surely the leakage is the difference between live and neutral currents...

Sounds like you had one of the conductors running through the clamp in the wrong direction, thus adding the currents rather than measuring the difference.
 
Thanks for the replies.conductor going the wrong way sounds favorate..the jobs in a bank and they wont allow me to switch much stuff off.There are no rcds so the neutrals are nowhere near the lives.. It would just be easier to have two clamps rather than one especially if they could connect to the one tester to show results...doing it separately i realise the load can be constantly varying.
 

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