SuperMediaStore.com has the new P3 International P4460 Kill A Watt Electricity Usage Detector for $50 with free shipping. Free TDK Noise Canceling Headphones with purchase. It improves upon the original P4400 (which is included in this kit as well) by providing direct energy cost calculations so that you can see how much your plug-in gadgets cost to leave on. [BizRate]
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Uh... yeah, I'm going to have to say "buy at newegg" for $10 less shipped...
Yeah, you don't get the free $17 headphones... I guess if you wanted them, it's a good deal.
If this kit did indeed include a p4400, it really would be a pretty good deal (assuming you want both a p4400 and a p4460, though the p4400 would be rather redundant once you had a p4460.). Nonetheless, there is no indication that this "kit" comes with a p4400 on SMS's web site.
You plug the P4400 into the P4460 to determine how much energy this device uses. Duh!
if you plug this device into itself, it reads out "infinity" and then explodes.
#3: What if you plugged the P4460 into the P4400? Would this setup implode?
Cannot self-terminate
Unfortunately these are ineffective at monitoring low power consumption.
In other words, wanna plug your (insert random device here) into it to find out how much power it wastes in standby mode? Won't work, it's not accurate down to a couple watts resolution. Some devices I have even read zero when they definitely consume a watt or two.
What does it mean? That to show power savings you would often have to unplug the device while it is in high power full on state (while you're trying to use the device which was the whole point of buying it).
It's still an interesting toy, though the most useful thing I find to use it for is comparing total computer system power usage when at stock speed, overclocked, and by enabling aggressive C1E and EIST power management modes. FWIW, on an overclocked system you can drop about 30W with these two features working well, takes a bit of experimentation to determine how low a voltage you can set at any given clockspeed and if it's too low it can easily cause data corruption - XP's checkdisk found a few hundreds of files that were lost that way, fortunately it was just a clean windows testbed, nothing of consequence.
So... the difference between this one and P3's earlier kill-a-watt is that you input your cost of electricity and this does the multiplication for you? For $30 more?
#6 - and thoughts on what *can* measure low power consumption? I wonder if the kill-a-watt can actually measure but truncates on display, which'd mean that you could leave a device-on-standby plugged in for a day and then look at cumulative usage. Might be time for me to retrieve my kill-a-watt and try this out...
#6 - and thoughts on what *can* measure low power consumption? I wonder if the kill-a-watt can actually measure but truncates on display, which'd mean that you could leave a device-on-standby plugged in for a day and then look at cumulative usage. Might be time for me to retrieve my kill-a-watt and try this out...
No, I had a constant current trickle battery charger that uses a little under, nearly 2W, left it connected for a day and a half and just prior to unplugging it I looked and it had not registered ANY power usage. The consumption for a couple computers in S5 soft-off mode looked a little low as well for their configuration, though I don't recall what it reported for those, maybe 4 watts.
Some other devices using more power may register, but I would not place any confidence in them registering correctly till you have more draw than most devices in standby consume.
Also it can display two watts, I have had other devices that registered this, it's just not remotely accurate at such low power levels. I don't know of any gadget like this that can measure so low but I tend to think it would be one with a smaller range in general then calibrated for that. I also suspect the Killawatt might be less accurate at the top of it's range, although that top might actually be higher than the rated max due to some other internal parts limitation (Or maybe it's not).