Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 213
 Works great August 30, 2010
Nick Schader (Sonora, CA United States)
I bought the Kill A Watt because I'm temporarily sharing power with a neighbor who is in the process of building a house. I wasn't sure how much to charge him so I bought this to monitor their usage. I've also used it around our house to see how much our appliances use. I've been surprised at how little most of our appliances use.
Meter works well as advertised August 28, 2010
Marc
This meter does just what it says - measures volts, amps, watts, RMS. I haven't even used the electricity cost function, because all I care about is the watt reading. It lets you find out which items suck up a lot of power on standby, on & idle, or at full power.
One picture above shows a short cord. This is not included, and unless you already have a short extension cord to use with it, get one (or a five-pack) of these.
Using this meter will show some surprises in who is using how much power. Standby monitors as power hogs? My 21" Viewsonic CRT (old-school) on standby uses 0.8 watt. Printers sucking up power because they're always on? My HP color bubblejet uses 7 watts on and idle. Console power usage? My XBox360 Elite uses 90 watts when on & idle in the dashboard, but 100 watts when on full crank during a game (Transformers War for Cybertron). Much smaller difference than expected. On the other hand, an external hard drive with a physical power switch "off" drew 2 watts! My HP 17" notebook draws 80 watts when off and charging!
Five Star, But You'll Find More Positive Status Quo Than Negative August 18, 2010
M. M. Jackson (St. Petersburg, FL United States)
We got ours last night and got down to business. Serious home-economics business. The big ones I was worried about were entertainment center with Wii, stereo, etc. "on idle", a laptop station in another room that is often left on and then finally I just installed a window A/C unit in our bedroom to avoid paying for all-night whole-house A/C when we are only in one room (childless couple as you may have imagined).
Anyhow, the entertainment center turned out to be costing us something like $15...per year. A buck and change a month. Not worth the hassle of fooling with, but I did put the Wii, amp, preamp and various disc players on a single switch on our uber-power supply in order that we can squelch even that.
I did some preliminary stuff around the house...lots of stuff like *newer* cell phone chargers draw almost literally nothing. I think it was $1.76 per YEAR *when charging* for our cell phone chargers...a pittance at cents a month. When phones are not plugged in, our chargers drew only LED power...i.e. unregisterable as it was less than one-tenth of a cent an hour.
So...mostly just confirmation that a lot of the potential "vampires" out there really aren't.
BUT...WOW...in some cases, you must be careful...
We stuck our Bunn coffeemaker in the thing. The numbers started ratcheting up...fifty dollars per year...seventy...one hundred and twenty...one hundred and fifty... OH MY GOODNESS...
The Kill A Watt EZ works on averaging over time, I realized we had *just* turned this thing on and it was going from cold to "heat water up - QUICK!" mode...in other words, drawing lots of power. That said, while Bunn coffeemakers I believe make the best tasting coffee and quick, they do the "quick" part of that by leaving the water heater on standby mode, always heating the water up as it cools.
Naturally, I have always wondered about how much that sucker costs per year. I think I will feed it some water and let it run for a few days to get an averaged yearly cost. Should be interesting and if Amazon lets me I will report back.
Secondly, another issue: I plugged this thing into our turned-off Oster blender...this is one of the classic vintage style blenders, if that matters at all...and it was reporting something like $4.75 per month, IDLE. Weird.
Then, after a bit, that number started dropping...and dropping...and dropping.
Perhaps when it first starts, there is some big surge that runs through it that was taking a while to be diluted by the draw-per-minute averaging in the Kill A Watt EZ.
Anyhow, I really think that thing uses nothing when plugged in and idle.
*** The important point to the blender example is that there will be a temptation to perform quick-hit analyses on your appliances, but this is not always the best strategy. This thing will give an accurate yearly cost for something that draws consistently, but anything that has a weird spike when first plugging it in or that turns on and off in terms of draw, like a Bunn coffee maker's water heater or a window A/C unit that blows cheap fan constantly, but turns on it's power-consuming compresser here and there must be left on for a while to get that averaging going. That is the only way you'll get an accurate and realistic actual-use cost. ***
Microwave was also basically nothing year-long when not in use...I think it was one dollar a year, maybe. It was apparently just powering it's little calculator-style LCD display, and that was it. The power gets sucked during cooking, but how many minutes per day are you doing that?
A floor fan costed $11...per year...to run continuously. The way we were using it, it was probably costing us $4.50 a year...and to think I used to get upset if one of us left it on all day. HA!
My InFocus projector (800x600 DLP projector) draws 1 cent per hour. Well, wow, that shocked me. I left that on for a while and it still reported 1 cent per hour. Good stuff! I am sure they will come out with LED projectors that use 1 cent per 10 hours, but until that time, I have no good reason to switch or upgrade...power is cheap.
(Oh, forgot to mention, power is 12 cents per kWh where I live at the moment...price your own accordingly).
Oh, that window A/C unit is - I think - about 8,000 BTU and came in at thirty-six cents per night. I am sure our A/C for the house was running at least dollar a night, judging by our bill, so this should save us 60% (36 cents instead of a buck) of about half of our bill (since 8 hrs we use A/C wall unit, 8 hrs we use whole-house and 8 hrs it is OFF completely during the day when we are gone). So 30% savings right off the bat...and that will pay for the A/C wall unit very quickly.
In the final analysis, there wasn't much adjustment made. This thing did not really directly pay for itself monetarily, but in terms of peace-of-mind, it definitely helped. I think our major expense is air conditioning, and after two months of our bill jumping over 50%, I am hoping the use of the window unit solves our energy "crisis." I sure couldn't find anything else (plugged in anyways, hardwired is another story) that seemed to draw anywhere near significant amounts of power.
The Kill A Watt EZ was worth it for me as a "peacemaker" - both with myself and with my wife. The peace-of-mind was easily worth the thirty bananas it costed, and the hour-day-month-week-year calculations are WELL worth the ten or twelve more bones you pay for the "EZ" model over the regular P4400...if I had to do it all over again, I'd still pick the P4460...well worth the hassle savings. The criticisms about it being hard-to-read and the solution to stick it on an extension cord (I used a power strip, which was perfect as it was short and highly portable versus a big bulky three-prong extension cord) are both spot on.
Well done, P3, for a great product. Our "vampire hunt" didn't turn up any convincing vampires, but it did ease our minds about them and allowed us to better focus our energy saving...well...energies.
Very Useful Product August 9, 2010
bigfish4545
Have you ever wondered how much money that spare refrigerator (or any electrical appliance) is costing you to operate each month? If you have, the kill-a-watt elecriticity monitor is for you. It works exactly as advertised and I was suprised at just how much power many of my electrical devices use. This device paid for itself the first month I had it. I recommend it highly. As always, Amazon and their resellers are top notch.
simple and easy July 5, 2010
Jack of All (IL, USA)
Very good product, pretty much plug-n-play. I could find out things around house that were sucking power for no reason. There is a portal to submit and share such readings at [...]. I encourage people to check it out.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 213
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