by Karen Lee

I live in the Northeast and as you might have guessed, my monthly electricity bill in winter months can feed a family of ten.

We try to save energy wherever we can although I don’t think we are a typical American family that has 3.5 TV’s, cable boxes, and game consoles. I don’t use the microwave, I don’t have a toaster oven and I don’t have space heaters. We have ONE TV, cable box, and game console. The only multiple number of appliances we have are laptops and LED desk lamps. But unfortunately, we have a forced air heating and cooling system. We were thinking about a different system for water heater – may be a tankless and maybe even replace our HVAC system with more fuel efficient system.

So when a Geothermalgenius.org offered a gadget called, “Kill a Watt EZ Power Meter” for me to test, I was intrigued. I can simply plug in an appliance and see how much energy it uses! Even though I couldn’t test the energy consumption for my water tank and the heating system – because they are not the plug in kind – at least I can find out what some of the other appliances use.

Silent Energy Consumption

We all heard how even when the appliances are turned off, they consume energy and that you can lower your utility bill by unplugging those appliances when you are not using them.

Well, I tried Kill a Watt Power Meter on the laptop, shredder, and LED desk lamp. I wish I could have used it on my other heavy duty appliances but at least the ones I tried, gave me an idea how the gadget worked.

The Result

Put it simply, all the appliances I mentioned consumed very little energy. In fact, all of them didn’t consume ANY energy when they were turned off. That is a great news, I thought.

My laptop used a mere 8 KW per Hr – that’s 8 cents! I was so relieved about that since we only have laptops at our house. And how about when it’s “off” or on “sleep” mode? It used NO energy.

My shredder used a negligible amount of energy as I only turn it on when I shred – it’s not on “Auto”. And when it’s “OFF” it used no energy.

I know the instruction said I should leave it on for longer periods for a better measurements but I wanted to use them on different appliances given a limited time. So I was only able to use it on one appliance per week. If I used it longer, maybe the result would have been different.

But I was relieved to find out that the small appliances we use frequently didn’t use that much energy. So now I know, the main energy drainer is my water tank and the HAVC system – the good news and bad news deal.

Kill a Watt

The gadget is easy to use and easy to set up. The large LCD display counts consumption by the kilowatt per hour (the manual explains as Kilowatt-hour but it really means ‘per hour’.

You can monitor the energy usage by plugging in whatever item you want into the device and it will tell you the energy consumption – the kilowatt per hour. It calculates voltage, line frequency, current, and even calculates the cost based on your energy rate.

If you are concerned with energy consumption like I am, you should definitely try this little gadget. I am going to continue to test ALL my appliances that I can reach to unplug to see where my energy consumption is.

Reprinted with permission from Green Living Ideas