Broken Bottle Blog

I wrote this post a while ago and had it saved, and kinda forgot about it, so just thought I’d throw it out.

So I bought this little device called the kill a watt energy monitor that can tell you all sorts of things about energy use in your home. Amazon.com has them for half off at $25 bucks. I just did some quick testing with it, mainly finding out how many watts my appliances use in their on and off states. Here’s what I found.

Now I have most of my stuff hooked up to power strip\surge protectors so I just tested those and whatever was plugged into it.

In my room:

1^st power strip consisting of a computer, speakers, monitor, and wireless router.

Everything running - 150 watts

Everything off but power strip on 11 watts

2^nd power strip consisting of T.V., cable box, stereo

Everything running 127 watts

off\ power strip on 22 watts

Alarm clock 1 watt (sitting idle, didn’t test while going off)

In living room

1^st power strip consisting of T.V. (a big one), cable box, Playstation 2, surround sound system with powered subwoofer.

Everything on 260 watts

Off\ power strip still on 103 watts

Other stuff.

Cordless phone x2 6 watts each

I didn’t test anything in roger’s room but he has a T.V. And dvd player plus an alarm clock. Everything else is major appliances like the fridge, water heater, and heater. The Kill A Watt has a feature that can give you cumulative power usage over a period of time, days, weeks, whatever. Perfect for the fridge, I think I’ll try to find out how much my kegerator pulls someday.

So Just in the living room and my bedroom we have 149 watts of power being consumed while nothing is “on”. The same as leaving a couple of lights (incadecent that is) on all the time. It’s pretty easy to convince someone to turn off the lights when they leave the room, little do they know the room is still sucking power. I put everything on power strips on purpose because I don’t have enough plugs for everything and I’ve gotten into the habit of turning off the strips when I’m not home or not using them. Probably why you haven’t seen me on instant messenger, my computer is off most the time. Sticking to the laptop most of the time.

Why go to all this trouble you say? First of all it’s not that much trouble some to switch off a power strip. Secondly, it saves money on the electric bill. Third, I’m relying less on fossil fuels, how you say? Take an excerpt from this website http://www.puc.state.tx.us/nrelease/2001/020101.cfm

Texans also will benefit from a diversified power supply. About 46 percent of the electricity in Texas come from natural gas-fired plants. Coal and Texas lignite supply about 41 percent of the fuel mix, with 13 percent coming from nuclear plants. The rapidly growing renewable energy sector currently supplies less than one percent of the state’s electricity. Already more than 20 wind projects have been proposed in West Texas and several are under construction.

Most of our electricity comes from natural gas and coal, fossil fuels. I’m surprised hydro power wasn’t on the list, thought we had more of that around here.

Really interesting video I saw a few weeks ago. Kinda scary, but interesting. It’s not new so you may have seen it already. I finally figured out how to post videos with the new wordpress, just needed to download a plugin, duh.