If you want to consume less of any resource — money, time, energy — you generally need to analyse your current usage to determine where to conserve.
How can you analyse your electricity consumption? First, you have to measure it. Some appliances are labelled in watts, like light bulbs and hairdryers and microwaves, but many aren’t, like the TV and DVD player, the cable modem, wifi access point, and that multi-GHz supercomputer under your desk.
Enter the Kill-a-Watt. I just bought one of these ($25 at Amazon, cheap) to better understand where all the power goes.
So far I’ve used it only for spot readings: plug in a device, measure the draw in watts when switched off (aka the phantom load), when idling, and when in full use. But the Kill-A-Watt is capable of accumulating kWh usage over time, too.
If you like, multiply the day’s kWh value for a particular device by the cost per kWh charged by your local utility. (The cost of a kilowatt-hour probably appears on your utility bill; for example, here’s a sample PG&E bill showing electricity rates.) That gives you the true daily operational cost of the device you measured.
Some reviewers have claimed they saved enough in electricity to pay for the Kill-A-Watt in a month. That won’t be true for me, because I’ve been squeezing out waste for about six years. But it is helping me understand the true cost of every electrical device in the house, which will guide additional conservation efforts during peak periods on the TOU clock this summer.
What really appeals to me is the ability to read a device’s power draw instantly. Wasteful habits, like leaving all the lights on, or opening the refrigerator door 30 times when cooking dinner, generate no immediate negative feedback about the costs of those habits. The Kill-a-Watt is a great first step at raising one’s awareness of power consumption.
And the truth is, unless you’re already a hardcore conservationalist, the Kill-A-Watt probably will pay for itself before too long.
I’ll post some of my watt readings over the next few weeks. Stay tuned.