I absolutely love this product, it's one of the best devices I've aquired in a long time. When I purchased it a few years ago, I paid close to $50, but it was worth every penny. Some of my joy from using the device simply comes from the fact that I'm curious how much energy the products in my home use (I now know, for instance, that my cable box uses 15W of energy whether it is on or off, at that it wastes a little more than 10 kilowatt hours each month, or that my fridge uses 350W when on, or that my laptop only uses 40W - a useful fact to know when I went to buy an inverter to use it in my car), but it can also be used to save energy (I found that hitting the switch on the surge supressors of my computers at night can save me almost $5 a month off my electric bill). Additionally, it's interesting to find out where all the power you use goes, and even what members of the family use the most electricity (you could do a side by side comparason of a child's computer with yours).
Even though I've had my Kill-A-Watt for years, I still take it out regularly to test any new equipment in my home. I know my cell phone charger uses 4 W, my regular battery charger 5 W, and my IC3 15 minute battery charger 73 W.
Surely most will not have as much fun with this unit as I do, but it can be both practical and enjoyable for people such as myself or those looking to save some money off their electric bill. It's also an asset for anyone off-grid, who is generating their power with solar energy or by other renewable means.
If you are a "Miser," this device will be your best friend. I bought the "Kill-A-Watt" because I suspected that our old Fridge was shooting up the electric bill. I plugged the Fridge into the meter and left it for 3 days. I was very surprised to find out the the fridge was only burning about 1.5 KWH (Kilowatt Hours) per day, which is about what it should.
Now I am going around the house and plugging other appliances in for a couple days. The real shocker was that my "economical" eMachines PC along with a CRT monitor was using more energy than the fridge! The computer was burning almost 2 KWH per day. I made changes to the energy saver software in Windows, so that the monitor automatically shuts off in 10 minutes and the computer hibernates in 1 hour. This has brought the daily consumption down to 1 KWH.
For those of you who don't understand KWH, its a measurement of electric usage by the power company. To be simple, using a KWH is about .08¢ in our area. So, if you save 1 KWH per day, you save .08¢ After a month's time, it's about $2.48. After a year it's about $30 bucks. The savings add up over time.
With the Kill-A-Watt, I've found out lots of interesting things:
My Mac Mini with a LCD monitor uses about 1/2 the power of my eMachines Tower with CRT. That's 70 Watts vs. 140 Watts.
My Electric Blanket which I though was "economical" pulls 120 Watts during operation. It actually uses 1 KWH per day. I even found out that the blanket burns 10 Watts when the power switch is off!
I found many "power bandits" in my home. These are devices like cellphones, scanners, routers, modems that have those little black power blocks. Most of these devices use 5 to 10 watts with the power switch off. With the Kill-A-Watt, I was able to find the biggest offenders and plug them into a timer that shuts off each night when they are not in use.
If you are truly obsessive about your electrical bill like me, you can make a nice Excel spreadsheet with all your appliances. You can enter Watts, Kilowatt Hours, Price per hour and than figure if replacing a device would pay for the purchase and how long it will take.
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