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Looks like the price is coming down.
How can I use this to check and monitor lights. My kitchen lights are always left on and I would like to know what it is costing. They are turned off and on with a wall switch. Any way to do this?

You would have to do some wiring trickery to make your light switch control a common A/C outlet, and attach a suitable grounded plug to your light fixture. Not impossible, but plenty of trouble to go thru just to find out how kwh's you're wasting. It might be easier to just install a motion sensor light switch to turn the lights off after a few minutes, or just train yourself (or whomever) to turn the lights off when leaving the room.

Looks like a good price. Any reason not to pull the trigger from the experts?

Get one and you'll see how many kw's are evaporating running useless junk around your house. Unless you're already making a really conscious effort to disconnect stuff that isn't being used, many households easily waste more than this thing costs / month. All it does is tell you how much appliance x draws; the much harder part is actually following through and unplugging stuff or remembering to turn stuff completely off when not in use.

Incandescent light bulbs are usually 60, 75, or 100 watts. Just count how many you have of each and calculate. You dont need this meter to measure light bulb usage.

$19 with free shipping isn't quite the lowest price ever for this item but its close and a good deal. Don't hold your breath for a lower price.

This model loses its memory when unplugged. Thats not too bad other than if plugged into a switched outlet it resets every time you turn the light on. Another newer model costs almost twice as much but has internal memory backup so it runs through "power failures." Also adds the ability to enter kWh cost so that it displays $ rather than kWh.

Are you kidding #1? The wattage (and thus current) of lights is printed right on the package if not the light itself.

However, I have to laugh when #2 calls it "tricky wiring", it's quite simple but if someone doesn't know they probably have no business fiddling with their wiring.

Let's do some math. Supposing about 10 cents a KWH, you'd have to waste 190 KWH a month, 6.3 KWH a day, 263 watts an hour to pay for this in a month. There are not enough things in a typical home that you have the option of unplugging and still retaining reasonable use when you need such devices, to save 263W an hour.

Taking the time to plug and unplug some devices could actually waste MORE power than leaving them on because it takes longer to get things done fiddling with plugs and switches, so you left the lights on longer to get done what you were doing which eats more power than you tried to save.

This meter could still pay for itself eventually, but it has another handy use - to verify your computers have their power management working properly.

Used one & found that "wall warts" - DC adaptors are 1W even with nothing attached.

The
Knock Knock.
Who's there?
Bacon.
Bacon who?
was my coffee pot at 800W, so i no longer brew a whole pot in advance!

And the 42" plasma is only 160W - that's a pleasant surprise.

#7, maybe it is not tricky, it is more of a pain to remove wall switches to add a plug and outlet to find out with this how much power is being used over a period of time using a kill-a-watt.

Do you really want my mom/gf to ask why wires are hanging out of the wall?

do you really expect this to last only one month?
you are lucky that your electricity is so cheap!
PGE in california charges $0.40577 per kwh for 200-300% of baseline and $0.47393 over that!

I do agree that for lights, it is much easier to add up the watts printed on the bulbs to figure out cost per hour of operation.

the kill-a-watt is more for things that cycle on and off like a refrigerator or freezer. An old fridge in the garage could use $19 worth of power many times per year with what PG&E charges.

for me it is worth the $19 to know. even if it does not make me unplug something.

Keep in mind that the watts used by lights is also heat. In the winter if you heat with electric heaters (as I do in Florida) then burning the lights is no additional cost. BUT in the summertime you use an additional approx equal amount of electricity used by the lights to pump the heat out of the house. So in the winter when I'm running heat I don't worry about lights left on but in the summer I turn lights off with a vengence.

@7 that calculation is only for one month, and your electricity is too cheap. But you are right in pointing out that you have to actually save that much energy to pay it off.

Personally, the $19 isn't for finding things to save energy. I got one so I could tell where it wasn't worth my time/energy to turn it off.

@10 The lights in your house aren't as efficient as your heater for heating up your place. For example, they lose a lot of energy as light. If they are installed in the ceiling, then you are also losing close to half your heat through the ceiling. You'd be better off turning off lights you don't need, and using your heater.

#11 incandescent lightbulbs use much more energy for heat than light I think it is more than 90% heat. even the light degrades to heat inside your house(as it bounces around) except for the bit that goes out the windows. I had not considered how bad ceiling lights are for getting heat into a room, that is a good point. It amazes me that houses are still being made with loads of pot lights and regular resistive electric heaters.