P3 International P4400 Kill A Watt Electricity Usage Monitor
by P3 INTERNATIONAL
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List Price: Our Price: $14.99 You Save: $15.00 (50%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Category: Tools See more product details |
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Tools and Hardware Reviews of P3 International P4400 Kill A Watt Electricity Usage Monitor
Customer Review: Nifty little thing
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a neat tool for assessing energy efficiency. I found out some amazing things about power consumption of my appliances.
First things first, I recommend getting a short 6 ft three-prong extension cord to use with the Kill-a-Watt. The display is hard to read unless you're looking at it straight on, so when plugging it in behind the refrigerator, entertainment center, computer, etc., you'll need a way to access the device when things are plugged into it.
Second, for devices like the fridge that power on and off as part of their job, leave the device plugged in for a few days and then look at the KWH screen and divide it by the hours counter, and multiply by 24 to determine how much power it uses per day. If you just look at the instantaneous power usage, it doesn't tell you much since you don't know how much it is actually running per day.
The most interesting thing to gage with this device is the standby power losses from electronics. I came across an absolute power HOG in my entertainment center. I have an older 50-cd Sony shelf system that has begun to have problems with the buttons working as they should and other randomly bizarre behavior. But I wouldn't have guessed that it was also using a whopping 20 watts of power when in standby! When it's playing a cd at full volume, it only uses 28 watts. Imagine that! That's about 14.5 kWh per month, which is about $1.50 on my power bill, just for being plugged in. Yuck! So I'm always careful to unplug it when not in use.
I have an older refrigerator, which is also a large power user. It uses 1140 kWh per year, which is more than $100 worth of power. Some of the best Energy Star refrigerators on the market today use a third of that amount.
If you get one, be sure to lend it to friends and family. Once you've used it on all of your appliances, it sits in a drawer most of the time. It's great to tell people about it and let them try it out for themselves.
Customer Review: Good product, do the expected work.
Summary: 5 Stars
This product works as expected. I purchased this unit to make an analisis about parasit power consumption in my electronic appliances in home.
I discover the following:
- the lcd requires 180 ~ 230 watts. After going to standby or shutdown, the tv use 60 watts for 3 minutes. This is to cool down the lcd lamp for protection (fans and additional circuit works for this time). Can be a mistake if I remove the AC cable power or enterely shutdown the tv without allow this process to finish. Good discover. After this 3 minutes, the standby mode on the monitor only requires 05. to 1w.
- my motorola cable system requires the same ammount of power (27 ~ 30 watts) no matter if this unit is ON or off!!!!... all the time is fully powered (because have an internal hard drive). But I believe (wrong!) this unit must save about 50% if is off.. but no!!!!
- the blackberry / sony ericson chargers do not drain any power (0W) from AC if the phone itself is not connected. I DON't need to disconect this chargers from the outlets.
- My APC Smart UPS 1500 drain 30 WATTS! even when is completely turned off!!!Is better to disconnect this unit from the ac cable!!! amazing!...
- My pc (dimension 9150) is a power hungry pc. Because have pentium D (first edition) who requires a lot of power. This pc requires 230 watts but when I play Command Conquer (3D real time strategy) and because I have a HD2900 ATI High Definition card who requires 650 watts PSU. Interesting: when I play the game the power rise from 230 to 300~320 watts!!!!
This unit is very usefull to understand how the electronic systems works and if are energy efficient and how you must manage this units to save power and money.
Highly recommended, is cheap and you can check your ac freq and exact voltage (i have 128 volts from 127 expected in the ac line)......
enjoy and sorry my english
Customer Review: VERY useful assist to energy conservation
Summary: 5 Stars
You can't conserve if you don't know what draws too much electricity.
Non-techies can use this too.....This device not only measures instantaneous power, but has a clock timer that measures time from when it is plugged in, and an accumulator that measures kWH since plugged in too. So plug your entire TV/Surround Sound setup into this, wait a week or so, read out the number of kWH it has recorded, the divide kWH consumed by the number of hours it has been plugged-in for (this gives the kWH/hour it uses). Multiply THAT number x 720 (hours in a month) and you NOW know how many kWH that set of equipment uses with great accuracy. Since your electric bill has a bunch of taxes, distribution and generation fees, divide your electric bill $ total by the number of kWH used and you will find somewhere between $.06 and maybe $.13/kWH cost (varies like crazy all over the USA and Canada) and multiply your cost/kWH times your tested entertainment system. You now know the cost per month.
I wish there was a 50-Amp clamp-on version of this so that you could clip a sensor over the wire(s) to each circuit breaker, to locate the circuit in your house that draws a lot....like the electric water heater, clothes dryer, AC or furnace. None of those appliances can plug into this unit (except window air conditioners).
I'm an engineer, have two of these, as I am SERIOUS about energy conservation (even have two energy-conservation patents applied for, and one granted). I use these regularly. I had one die, and the company replaced it, so P3 International gets 5-stars from me. They stand behind their products, they work and work well!!
>> Oh Yes...one thing, otherwise they would have gotten SIX stars....The display in unlighted....geeze guys, that would have been easy, one or two LEDs. So bring a flashlight when you read the Kill A Watt, as the ambient light by outlets is never adequate.
Customer Review: Holy cow, that was EASY!
Summary: 5 Stars
This was simple and easy to use.
All of my lights (most anyway) are CF. AC and laser printer are new, energy star, high efficiency, etc.
Of the 110v appliances in my house:
All computers/UPS upstairs = 350 watts combined
DVR=200 when fan is running high (busy or crashed), and 35 when off and idle.
52" LCD is 115W on startup and 90W in use, 7w powered off.
Deep Freeze = 250 running, but 17 idle. It amounted to about 4 KWH per day.
None of my kitchen appliances leak when not in use.
Fridge is energy star so I didn't monitor for any duration.
Laptops are max 90w, normally 42W, and nil when in standby.
Didn't check the kids PC, but it should be about 30W when not in use.
Glade plugin is 1W.
Emergency lighting in garage is zero when charged up.
All in all, my 2 servers upstairs amount for half of my non-HVAC consumption.
This was good to see, because I can convert some of the drives upstairs into 2.5" drives and cut power consumption substantially.
Also, if I power off the LCD screens, that saves a little. Ideally, I'd like to move them to geode or atom processors to drop consumption further.
But the big big big power consumption is heating and cooling, obviously. Discussing with a friend, extrapolating, I could drop consumption by $100/month if I get radiant barrier installed in my attic (ie, thick aluminum foil).
This all seems rambly but it's to take you through the process. Honestly, I wouldn't know to focus on this if I hadn't run around with the Kill-A-Watt and assessed power consumption. Suddently, $280 electric bill seems like something maybe I can tackle - decrease computing power load and install radiant barrier, and I should make back the $$ in a year.
The Kill-A-Watt has more than paid for itself.
Customer Review: Excellent Product!
Summary: 5 Stars
I absolutely love this product, it's one of the best devices I've aquired in a long time. When I purchased it a few years ago, I paid close to $50, but it was worth every penny. Some of my joy from using the device simply comes from the fact that I'm curious how much energy the products in my home use (I now know, for instance, that my cable box uses 15W of energy whether it is on or off, at that it wastes a little more than 10 kilowatt hours each month, or that my fridge uses 350W when on, or that my laptop only uses 40W - a useful fact to know when I went to buy an inverter to use it in my car), but it can also be used to save energy (I found that hitting the switch on the surge supressors of my computers at night can save me almost $5 a month off my electric bill). Additionally, it's interesting to find out where all the power you use goes, and even what members of the family use the most electricity (you could do a side by side comparason of a child's computer with yours).
Even though I've had my Kill-A-Watt for years, I still take it out regularly to test any new equipment in my home. I know my cell phone charger uses 4 W, my regular battery charger 5 W, and my IC3 15 minute battery charger 73 W.
Surely most will not have as much fun with this unit as I do, but it can be both practical and enjoyable for people such as myself or those looking to save some money off their electric bill. It's also an asset for anyone off-grid, who is generating their power with solar energy or by other renewable means.