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Product: P4400 Kill A Watt
Manufacturer: P3 International
MSRP: $39.95 [BizRate]
Lowest Historical Price: $19 [History]
Introduction
We live in a world that is growing ever more concerned about energy usage and energy efficiency. If you have a desktop computer or a home theater, you know firsthand how much wiring hides behind your systems. How much electrical energy do these devices use? The P3 International Kill A Watt aims to demystify what exactly is contributing to your electrical bill.
In a nutshell, the Kill A Watt is an electricity usage monitor that installs between your wall outlet and the device(s) that you want to monitor. It displays real-time statistics such as Voltage, power (Watts), current (Amps), Line Frequency (Hz), and Power Factor. The really useful portion is displayed via the purple button, which shows the cumulative electrical usage in Kwh as well as the total test duration in minutes and hours.
Usage
There's not much to say about usage, except that you plug it in and then plug in the device that you want to monitor. The toggle buttons are self explanatory and you can take a look at the brochure. It does hog all of the adjacent electrical outlets in a typical wall plate unless you use an extension cord. The LCD is also hard to read in many situations so it would be nice to have a backlit option in future revisions.
Performance
As soon as it is plugged in, the Kwh meter begins accumulating a history of the total energy used, so it is best to leave it monitoring your device over a typical usage cycle. For example, I opted to test my home PC and associated peripherals by splicing the Kill A Watt in between the wall outlet and my main power strip. Over the course of 380 hours (about 16 days) it showed that 61.76 Kwh had passed through. Using some basic math I figured out that this would accumulate to 118.72 Kwh per month. I then consulted a recent electrical bill for the prevailing rate of $0.11430/Kwh, and extrapolated to an annual cost of about $163 to keep my PC & peripherals running under my typical usage patterns.
Armed with information like this, one can take preemptive steps to reduce electricity consumption. If you're the type that keeps your PC on 24x7, consider configuring your PC to go into standby mode when it is idle (mine is already configured as such). The electricity bill savings could go towards your next upgrade.
Conclusion
With the price of the basic Kill A Watt hovering at about $20 for the past few months, it's a relatively inexpensive purchase that has the potential to save you its cost many times over. However, many of its benefits can be realized by simply adopting power-conscious habits. The benefit of the Kill A Watt is that it gives you quantitative data that you can use to calculate your exact expenditures and savings.
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Price History
Manufacturer: P3 International
MSRP: $39.95 [BizRate]
Lowest Historical Price: $19 [History]
Introduction
We live in a world that is growing ever more concerned about energy usage and energy efficiency. If you have a desktop computer or a home theater, you know firsthand how much wiring hides behind your systems. How much electrical energy do these devices use? The P3 International Kill A Watt aims to demystify what exactly is contributing to your electrical bill.
In a nutshell, the Kill A Watt is an electricity usage monitor that installs between your wall outlet and the device(s) that you want to monitor. It displays real-time statistics such as Voltage, power (Watts), current (Amps), Line Frequency (Hz), and Power Factor. The really useful portion is displayed via the purple button, which shows the cumulative electrical usage in Kwh as well as the total test duration in minutes and hours.Usage
There's not much to say about usage, except that you plug it in and then plug in the device that you want to monitor. The toggle buttons are self explanatory and you can take a look at the brochure. It does hog all of the adjacent electrical outlets in a typical wall plate unless you use an extension cord. The LCD is also hard to read in many situations so it would be nice to have a backlit option in future revisions.
Performance
As soon as it is plugged in, the Kwh meter begins accumulating a history of the total energy used, so it is best to leave it monitoring your device over a typical usage cycle. For example, I opted to test my home PC and associated peripherals by splicing the Kill A Watt in between the wall outlet and my main power strip. Over the course of 380 hours (about 16 days) it showed that 61.76 Kwh had passed through. Using some basic math I figured out that this would accumulate to 118.72 Kwh per month. I then consulted a recent electrical bill for the prevailing rate of $0.11430/Kwh, and extrapolated to an annual cost of about $163 to keep my PC & peripherals running under my typical usage patterns.Armed with information like this, one can take preemptive steps to reduce electricity consumption. If you're the type that keeps your PC on 24x7, consider configuring your PC to go into standby mode when it is idle (mine is already configured as such). The electricity bill savings could go towards your next upgrade.
Conclusion
With the price of the basic Kill A Watt hovering at about $20 for the past few months, it's a relatively inexpensive purchase that has the potential to save you its cost many times over. However, many of its benefits can be realized by simply adopting power-conscious habits. The benefit of the Kill A Watt is that it gives you quantitative data that you can use to calculate your exact expenditures and savings.
Image Gallery
Price History
#33, a multimeter will tell you volts or amps, but not both simultaneously, which is what you need to figure out watts. Since the voltage fluctuates a little, using one of these is more accurate than an inline or clamp-on ammeter.
I just rebuilt my desktop (which mostly acts as a fileserver for the various laptops around the house) with low-power components and got its idle draw down from ~150 watts to 46. When the bulk storage drives spin down, it drops to under 20. (The system disk is never idle enough to spin down, courtesy of Windows' background antics, but it's a laptop drive and only consumes ~2 watts anyway.)
I've used my kill-a-watt to dispel some energy myths. The prevailing wisdom is that if your fridge is over 10 years old, it's inefficient enough to pay for its own replacement after just a few years. Our fridge is 14, but it was a high-efficiency model for its time, and still comes in neck-and-neck with today's models.
It's also good for UPS sizing. I know what all my computer equipment draws, and that's no big deal, but in an extended outage, other things become important, like showers. Our water heater is a high-efficiency gas-fired model with an exhaust fan (the combustion gases coming out have given up so much of their heat, they won't reliably rise up a chimney), so powering that fan is a concern. Plugging it in through the Kill-a-Watt showed me that it draws about 450 watts while spinning up, and just over 250 while running. That's well within the capability of my good extended-runtime UPS, so I know I can just carry it down to the furnace room if I need a batch of hot water during a power outage.
When you have a tool like this around, you find all sorts of uses for it. Right now, mine is plugged in between a car battery charger and the wall, so I can see when the battery's topped off because the power draw will sink.
nice device, got it last year for $18.
My 8800GTS G92 + Q6600 OC+ 4GB + 3HDDs draws 280W at Idle and 430W at max load
My 8800GTS G92 + Q6600 OC+ 4GB + 3HDDs draws 280W at Idle and 430W at max load
I'm guessing that you're just reading that straight from this meter. Remember, that when looking at this to figure out which power supply you want to buy, you need to factor in your power supply's efficiency. Without knowing what power supply you're using, I'd guess that your computer components are actually drawing somewhere from 300watts to 345watts. Also, did you include your screen in that wattage reading?
Nice, #41...thanks for some good ideas.
Good for testing your computer and devices to see if you UPC can handle them all at once. If your UPC can't handle the your wattage hungry machine. It's probably a good idea to upgrade.
#20 item is currently unavailable
Compwiz is so desperate he has left the PSU comments and is bravely going into other things he really has no idea about. A rodeo cowboy light on your dash dosent tell you theyre is to much draw its to tell you theyre isnt 14vt coming off the output post any more. I guess you dont understand the signal pick up on the back of all alternators. Its not a generator but I dont have the time to teach you how a automobile works they are allot more complicated then your dopey computer. Ive been restoring european cars for over twenty five years so dont get me started or Ill clean the burp street with you. I drive a #1 1982 M635csi and a #2 88 M5 for vacations and groceries. You rodeo cowboy have built hundreds of computers? Big burp deal my thirteen year old niece built her own computer, what a joke it is to think putting together a machine with ten or less parts is anythng. Stay away from the deep end because no one will help you out here. Now go and reply to my comment and continue to dig yourself deeper and deeper into town foolery. Youre a joke and everybody knows it sexless wonder.
#43, its a Antec NeoHE 500 and its sweet spot is at around 380W (82% eff)
Yes, he figures I mentioned were at the socket. (the only one that matters really
It did not include the monitor(s)
I like the idea about taking the numbers and stuffing them in an Excel sheet to do calculations. Good for keeping track of individual electronic usage and past history. Thanks for the tip!
I have this. Works great. Really helps you figure out what is costing you on your electric bill.
great to see how much energy is used while a item is turned off, satellite boxes are a killer, i know have must om electronics on a power stip and turn them off when not in use.
I bought one, plugged it into my fridge, saw the amperage and thought.. cool, then I threw it in the junk drawer never to be seen again. Ummm what????
very useful in determining your power usage... found out my electrical wires waste energy even not using any electronics plug on it.