If measuring the power of a 3-phase circuit at 50% power factor using only 2 wattmeters, what will 1 wattmeter read?

In a 3-phase circuit, when assessing power using two wattmeters, it is important to understand how the readings relate to the total power and the power factor.

When the power factor is 50%, it means that the real power (the actual power consumed by the load) is at half the apparent power (the total power flowing in the circuit, which includes both real and reactive power). In a balanced 3-phase system, typically, two wattmeters are used to measure the total power.

Each wattmeter in a 3-phase system measures the power across a phase but cannot capture the complete contribution of all phases with just one wattmeter. Instead, one of the wattmeters will measure power while the other could potentially return a zero reading in cases of perfectly balanced loads or specific power factor situations.

In this scenario, with a 50% power factor, one of the wattmeters reads zero because the reactive component dominates. In a 3-phase system, when power factor reaches such a low level, the current phase angles can cause one of the wattmeter readings to diminish to zero. This situation reflects the failure to account for significant reactive power, which does not contribute to the real power consumption effectively.

Therefore, the reading of