Kill-a-watt meter findings

[veloman]

laptop during use - 14watts, hibernate - 0.4w
microwave in use - 1530w, idle - 2.3w. That's 20kwh a year. 20,000 watt hours!!! boy what could we do with 20,000wh on our ebikes!?! It's also interesting to know it takes about 50wh to reheat a bowl of stew. (2min)
modern standard size refrigerator - 114w running, 0 when not running
48v 4amp battery charger - 310w, idle - 8w (71% efficient)
cell phone charger 7w, idle - 0w
power drill full speed no load - 250w
drill press no load - 145w
13w swirly bulb in lamp - 14w, idle - 0w

That's about all I was interested in / all the electronics I have. So aside from the microwave, the phantom current thing is pretty much a myth I am going to say. We don't have a tv at my place, or gadgets like that.

I didn't buy the kill-a-watt, as it didn't make sense to spend money to save a little. My city libraries loan them out.

 

[dogman dan]

Yes, most of your devices will not have much current if off nowdays. Even the notorious "always warm" wallwarts for the computer stuff is nowdays only warm when you use the device.

The BIG phantom in my house is the damn TV cable boxes. If you turn them off it improves, but I got a bad habit of just leaving them on.

The killawatt is a cool device. I have a greenhouse, full of stuff that can take a light freeze in winter. During a recent cold snap, I ran a heater in there for a few hours a night. The killawatt told me that hundreds of dollars in plants was saved for less than 4 bucks. The light heating ended up costing about 50 cents a night. Nice to know stuff like that, so you can make informed decisions about it.

20,000 wh = about 500 miles at 25 mph for my commuter bike. Or about 40 outings on the dirt trails. Cost, about $ 2.60. Sounds huge in wh, but small in $$.

 

[Ykick]

I love kill-a-watt meters. It usually lives on my eBike charging station so I have a good idea of what my bike commute costs on monthly basis. But it's always revealing to try it on something different around the apt. Learned my fridge costs about $25/mon here in NYC. Power is insane expensive here - right at 30 cents per kWh.

 

[recumbent]

* snip * Power is insane expensive here - right at 30 cents per kWh.

We pay just under 10 cents per kwh, and i live nowhere near a power plant. New York must have lots of overhead to ask so much more.

It costs me .06 cents per hour to run my 600 watt charger, which never runs more than 2 hours if completely run-down.

 

[amberwolf]

Those idle power usages are why I keep everything on switched plugs or powerstrips, if it doesnt' have to be on all the time. WHenever I am not using it, it gets shut completely off, and it saves me a fair bit of money over the year. I have a post around here somewhere (probably in my Crazybike2 thread) detailing some of that.