Just bought a Kill-A-Watt electricity consumption meter

[Gone4]

Originally Posted by Sunfrost website

For power outages, we can equip your Sun Frost refrigerator with a non-interruptible power supply!

UPS actually use a surprising amount of power. During normal operation. Can you get a sunfrost without the UPS? Up north the power only goes out in the winter ice storms generally and then we can just move the food outside Just a few things like mayonnaise freeze and shouldn't.

[ankit]

Wow this device is pretty interesting. I wonder how much our 59 inch rear projection, which stays on from 3 to 10 most of the time, uses.

[Ryland]

Originally Posted by GenKreton

UPS actually use a surprising amount of power. During normal operation. Can you get a sunfrost without the UPS? Up north the power only goes out in the winter ice storms generally and then we can just move the food outside Just a few things like mayonnaise freeze and shouldn't.

No, the UPS on their fridges are an extra option that you can get, their standard fridge is just super efficent, pretty simple, and well built by real people! I've talked to the owner a number of times and he told me they used to offer an option of a heat pipe for cooling in cold climets, but that people didn't understand it so no one wanted to pay extra for it.
We got our sunfrost in 1987, and it's still in use, and as effecent or more so then alot of what you can get today.

The nice thing about the plug in meters is that you can leave something like your TV or cell phone charger pluged in to it for a few days or a week, and then look at the total hours it was monitering, and the total power used, my cell charger draws less then a watt, but it's hard to tell over a short chunk of time.

[H4MM3R]

Originally Posted by newtonsfirstlaw

Well, seeing as most people use the Kill-a-Watt about once, which is when they audit their house and write down figures for on and turned off, it's easy to just use the Kill-a-Watt.

The trick (not sure if I made it clear) is to measure what you want to measure in parallel with another, bigger, purely resistive load. The difference (with the resistive load on, and the smaller device in question on/off) will be the power draw of the smaller device. Yes, I know that taking power factor into consideration, it won't be exactly correct but it will be close enough.

The newer kill-a-watt will display power factor. However it really doesn't matter. Your Power Factor should be 1 or very very close to 1. What most people are looking at in there homes (in the USA) is 120/240vac single phase.

When calculating Power there two basic ways (1) True Power (2) Apparent Power.

The Kill-A-Watt P4400 can display either one.

[Who]

This is pretty interesting if you want to track the whole home. You can also track individual circuits (like heating or A/C) and see what the cost and run times are.

http://www.theenergydetective.com/what/overview.html

[TomEV]

We have a Vestfrost refrigerator. It uses about 1.1 kWh a day (averaged over a week or relatively normal temps, at least for here (70f during the day). I measured a lot of things with the Kill-a-Watt, but it now resides on the plug for the Citicar. It uses about 1 kWh for four miles, or about 2.5 kWh a day for my 10 mile 'commute' (5 each way). Even with the electric car, our average daily use is about 6 kWh a day.

It was interesting to note the difference between a normal string of xmas lights compared to LED ones this year. The regular bulbs used about 60 watts, but the LED ones used about 2 (two). Our electric bill this December went down significantly...

[cfg83]

Who -

Originally Posted by Who

This is pretty interesting if you want to track the whole home. You can also track individual circuits (like heating or A/C) and see what the cost and run times are.

http://www.theenergydetective.com/what/overview.html

This is pretty cool. I like it more than the other "whole house" one whose name escapes me because it actually taps into the voltage instead of "watching" the power thingy spin in the fusebox.

The 400 Amp one might be in our future because we want to install an electric kiln for a home pottery business. With a TED, we would be in a position to exacti-mate our kiln's energy costs.

CarloSW2

[Sethro]

definitely don't believe the hype with LCD TV's. I purchased a 37" DYNEX from Best Buy and read the power usage label 220W. Whereas my 18 yo Sony Trinitron 27" tube uses 160W. That TED looks mighty tempting, I'm curious of what my electric range, AC, hottub, and 90% efficient gas furnace use. Those things don't use a plug.

Also the best way to reduce power is light source conversion. I haven't done much yet but I can't stand the fluorescent bulbs so LED's are the next option and its looking like the market is pretty good nowadays.

OBTW, The Dynex was returned, LCD TV's are crap (yes I've spent hours staring at them in the stores). Holding out for laser...

[Cd]

Originally Posted by Erdrick

The Kill-A-Watt is pretty accurate in my experience. My Wii uses 2 watts in standby (with wiiconnect off). .

How much does it use when on ? Does the unit have an automatic 'sleep' mode ?

( I'm thinking of all the hundreds of millions of kids that just walk away from a game to go play and leave the things running.
)

[Cd]

I tested my Toshiba m200 tablet PC ( tiny 12 " screen )
In maximum power mode it consumes between 36 and 42 watts ( 42 watts when doing graphic intensive work in my 3D program. )
When on the intenet, I set the power mode to 'normal' or 'low power' mode, which consumes 24/27 watts in normal mode, and 20/22 watts on low power mode.
By itself, the screen comsumes just 8 watts of power.

By comparison, a 20 " iMac consumes 200 watts.
A Power Mac PC ( tower ) can consume over 900 watts even before the monitor is plugged in.

A stand alone 20" LCD monitor typically consumes around 65 -85 W.
If I doubled the area of my laptop screen ( to 24 " ) I would consume just 16 Watts - and this is a very high resolution screen.
How can it be that laptop screens are so much more efficient, yet produce the same results as regular monitors ?