Kill a Watt
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:
1st power strip consisting of a computer, speakers, monitor, and wireless router.
Everything running - 150 watts
Everything off but power strip on 11 watts
2nd 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
1st 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.
Does switching the power-strip off accomplish the same thing as unplugging the appliances? That’s a good trick if so. I might have to run a similar experiment in my own homestead.
Comment by Outlandish Josh — April 19, 2007 @ 5:23 pm
Yeah, that’s basically what it does. It’s easier to flip the switch than to unplug everything, you can even reach it with your toes and just flip it. Every little bit counts you know, I mean does anyone really use the clock on the VCR, no use in it sucking power constantly. We have three TV’s here and Roger is out of town most the time, so no use in them all being plugged in 24/7. One drawback is that we have dish network for our tv service and when you turn the power strip back on it takes about a minute for the cable box to reset and download our program info, but just a minor problem.
Comment by Scott — April 20, 2007 @ 2:14 pm
You are such a tree hugger, good info though. Did you find any info on what an average of about 2000 sq ft house pulls? I am curious as to how much lower an electric bill could be if we did that to all of the appliances excluding fridge, microwave and such. I have also heard an interesting fact that the US uses 1/3 of the energy throughout the world.
Comment by Roger — April 22, 2007 @ 1:47 pm
Well, the only other appliances we could do that with is the ones in your room. Everything else is off, when i’m not here. Just the fridges, water heater and a/c are on, and the a/c has been off for over a month. I even unplugged the phones and answering machine since we don’t need them anymore. I got more ideas, but will save them for another post. By the way, our electric bill this month was $76.56, but we’re still $460 in the hole. It’s so low mainly because of the a/c being off, I believe. Also, TXU has been advertising that they are lowering rates at least double digits, whatever that means, so that may be part of it too.
Comment by Scott — April 22, 2007 @ 6:42 pm