KiT/KaT6550 Power consumption.

[Yellow]

Hi all,

Just had a new Smart-Meter fitted the other day.
I've never measured my amp's power consumption which is odd, but I was curious.

These WAD amps give off a lot of heat so I thought I'd take a look at how much power mine is consuming. I was actually quite surprised...in a good way!!

After switch-on and stabilisation, my KaT 6550 is drawing 280 Watts (no music playing) from the grid.
Has anyone else tried this?

Neil.

[Richard]

Excellent Neil, no haven't tried it and don't have a smart meter, but that looks accurate as the amp has a 1.6A fuse fitted and occasionally blows it at switch-on so I figured something over an amp

[bikerhifinut]

Hi,
First I hope its a smartmeter that doesn't go dumb when you change supplier, I won't entertain one here because they don't work when the mobile network the supplier uses winks out, an all too common occurrence here. That plus the information you are supplying , free of charge, to your provider so that in future they can tailor a billing strategy aimed at fleecing you based on your consumption patterns. Think I'm paranoid? It's called profit maximisation and all big businesses use every tool available to fleece customers.

Ok well seeing as the 6550 probably uses a 300VA transformer as does the WD KT88 then a 280W consumption sounds about right. Which by the way is more than every light fitting in our house...……………………. LED's may be noisy but by eck they are efficient.

It's easy enough anyway to work out your valve amps consumption, you know the heater current draw so a simple ohms law sum gets that. The rest can be worked out by a quick multimeter measurement of the voltage across the cathode resistors of each valve and adding up, most WD amps work in Class A. Then add on another wee bit for ttransformer effiency.

A.