Kill-a-Watt
Here’s a gadget called Kill-a-Watt, which measures how much electricity an appliance (or whatever) is sucking up. The idea, of course, is that by measuring usage, the user can effectively cut back where waste occurs. The little object costs between $17.99 and $29.00, depending on where you buy it. So, conceivably, this gadget could bring about enough electricity savings in a year to pay for itself at least once, if not a couple of times over. Not to mention the savings in electricity use, which is always a good thing all by itself—since it appears that our old and infirm power grid is looking at some dark days ahead if we don’t cut our use. I’m thinking about getting it. Maybe from FadFusion.
Since the lad has been away, my electricity use has nearly been cut in half, but I still can’t get my daily use below 8.5 kWh. That seems crazy considering the few items I use in a day. Something is eating up electricity and I’d like to know what.
I have done the same thing as Joann. With three kids and and lots of electonics in this house, it’s a must. Now, if I could just get everyone to actualy turn off the power stips everyday before they leave for school and at night before the go to bed.
Posted by justme on 10/21/06 at 07:24 AM
After the lad left, I went around and unplugged a bunch of stuff. The TV and VCR are unplugged just about all the time - except when I use the TV, but I leave the DVR on so it can record at all hours. Still, during the day I leave that on standby. There’s only one computer on during the day now, but it goes into sleep mode when I’m away from the computer for more than 10 minutes. It’s not real convenient sometimes, but it also seemed to help a lot. It goes off at night as ever. And I have replaced all but two light bulbs with fluorescents. After all that, I’m down to the 8.5 kWh per day. So it’s something else that’s eating the electricity. I have a feeling it might be the 13 year old refrigerator that’s the big electricity guzzler, but I could be surprised at finding something else I haven’t even thought about. I am curious to know exactly how much juice is flowing out of each outlet in the house.
Posted by Kate on 10/21/06 at 12:17 PM
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All those devices that say they are off - aren’t really off. For instance - your VCR is still keeping time on it’s clock - the DVD player is still doing something, even with the power button pressed to off. I finally put all those devices on the same power strip and make a habit of turning off the power strip - which turns off all the devices at once. I had to take the VCR off it because the hubby complained about it constantly blinking 12:00 at him and he hated to reset the clock all the time (a time obsessed person he is).
Wtih each computer that we have in the house I noticed our power bill go up by 5 dollars a month - so I made a point to turn them off when not in use rather than have them go to power saving mode.
That sure is a neat device - I think I want one for Christmas.