P3 International P4400 Kill A Watt Power Usage Monitor
From Amazon.com:
Product Description
The Electricity Detector and Electricity Monitor can reduce your monthly electric bill and help you save a lot of money. Electricity bills can be murder. But now with Kill a Watt you can cut down on costs and find out what machines are actually worth keeping plugged in. Simply connect your appliances to the Kill A Watt and Kill a Watt will assess how efficient they really are. Kill a Watt with large LCD display will count consumption by the Killawatt-hour, same as your local utility. With the help of Kill a Watt you can figure out your electrical expenses by the day, week, month or year. Kill a Watt can check the quality of your power by monitoring Voltage, Line Frequency, and Power Factor. Now you’ll know if it is time for a new refrigerator or if that old air conditioner is saving you money. Don’t be another casualty. With the amazing Kill A Watt, you’ll have wasteful devices pushing up daisies.
I absolutely love this simple, cheap, and effective tool for accurately measuring power consumption. It’s paid for itself more than a few times in helping me to determine what items I really need to turn off – and home much power some devices still draw when they are off!
The meter is very simple, all it requires is that you plug it into an outlet and whatever you want to measure gets plugged into the meter. I took the meter and plugged it into a power strip so I don’t have to plug it into the wall – it’s easier to read this way because I can move it around. As soon as you unplug the meter all the recorded information is lost however – so keep that in mind.
You can use it for a week to see what total kWh something uses or you can do quick on the fly calculations by simply looking at how many watts are being used at any one moment. (# of watts)/(1000)*(Cost of a kWh, $0.10 is pretty average in the US)*(hours used per day)*(365 days per year) = total cost per year to use that device.
When you get one do yourself a favor and use it to measure your entertainment system – when it’s off. Then look at your phone recharger when it’s just plugged in with no phone attached. unplug that recharger and you’ll save some money. Unplug all your random device recharges and you’ll save even more…
It’s pretty easy to find a few hundred watts of power being used 24 hours a day you can eliminate. 200 watts at $0.10 kWh is $175 a year. Thats something that deserves a closer look isn’t it? Get a kill-a-watt!
