I’mna have to get one of these.
The Kill-a-watt is an interesting tool. I’ve used them before, to check the actual power consumption of devices at work.
Oh, I can look at the power consumption and make a calculation, but it’s nice to be able to just plug something in and see in doillars and cents how much its costing you to run each month. Being a cheap bastard, and trying to get my utilities costs down to as close to nil as possible, I think this would be a handy thing to have around the house. The wallwarts alone in this house must cost twenty bucks a month to run.
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Assuming you pay 10 cents per kilowatt hour, do you really have wall warts that consume 278 watts of power?
It’s about 11, actually, and on top of this desk, there are five.
I got one a couple years ago, mostly to check actual consumption for my little emergency (for outages) solar set up.
Interesting; the stated draw on many plug-ins is greater than the actual consumption (motor start-ups notwithstanding).
Neat little tool.
Handy device.
Use with a Variac to dial down your crock pot to “keep warm” at about 2/3 of its rated low-power wattage.
Good way to keep melted cheese dips from burning.
According to a (reliable looking, in the way technical, non-ideological content usually is) Wikipedia entry, a modern (last 4 or 5 years) power adapter should use under half a watt at idle.
This “feels” right, since I’ve certainly never noticed detectable warmth from the tiny little things.
And even “old” ones will use well under 5 watts, at no load.
Assuming you have 20 unused, OLD power adapters just wasting at a no-load state, that’s only 100 watts – well under the estimate for $20 a month.
(Plus, since it’s winter, remember that waste power = heat!)
Nothing against using the K-a-W, mind you. I just don’t think that the magnitude is so high per unit.
I’d put the number of wall warts plugged in here in the neighborhood of 90. There are three cellphones with two charging stations each. (don’t ask) There are three 100 base t switches. There are two routers. There are two portable phones. There are four battery chargers for the battery powered drills etc. There are chargers for Kindles, for untold video games both handheld and otherwise, and multiple peripherals (External hard drives and DVD/RW’s) that use them. Every power outlet here looks like the ones at Ralph Parker’s house.
My evil master plan is to have timers that turn on and off the power supplies for all these bastards so they don’t run all the farging time.
Great idea, sez this penny pinching barstard.
Lessee here…if a wallwart draws a half-watt continuously, but you only want it to draw a half-watt half-time, you saved exactly 6 watts over 24 hours, or 0.0025 of a KWH or three one-hundredths of a penny.
Be honest here, how much arm twisting did you have to do on the distaff members of your household to get them to unplug their wallwarts? Was it worth the not-quite penny per month you saved on each one?
How much is your time worth to argue this with them or effect some sort of engineering solution to save that penny a month each?
Leaving one 60-watt light bulb on for 100 hours costs you $0.72, whereas 100 wallwarts left idling half-time costs you 90 cents. Seems to me the conservation efforts should be at the light switches, not the wallwarts.
BTW, you have a wood stove, IIRC. Put some thermo electric generators on the chimney, put the power into a storage battery, invert the battery power with a tiny inverter, and plug a power strip into it. The wimmen can plug their wallwarts into the power strip, and that electricity is FREE.
http://www.tegpower.com/
Thermal converters/inverters are a big thing in Iceland. Hook one up alongside a thermal vent and you’ve got a continuous source of clean, consistent power as well as hot water and a heat source. Home Power magazine did a few articles on this about 1 years or so ago. Best of all, they don’t quit working if the sun goes down or the wind quits blowing.
Let us know how that works out. I’ve had a Kill-A-Watt for several years, and one irritating thing about it is that it fails to register extremely low current draws.
I don’t keep the chargers for cell phones, Kindles, etc plugged in at all times. I connect them only as they’re used. TV’s and computers do stay plugged, but I suspect that power usage is low.
I use mostly those damned CFL’s. I use a microwave oven more often than a conventional oven.
In south Texas, the biggest elecrical expense is air conditioning in the summer. The thermostat is programmable and the HVAC system is a 5-year old high efficiency heat pump. All windows are double-paned.
Theser’s only so much you can do.
I have an X10 system in the house, which allows me to switch the bottom half of each outlet set up for it. My plan is to go around and put the appropriate outlets on timers so they only charge at non peak hours, and only leave on the wallwarts that are actually critical- like the main router and the switches.
I leave most of my chargers unplugged 90% of the time, too, but it’s because I’m worried about the things dying from power line noise and voltage spikes. A modern switching power supply won’t draw anything (negligible power use, rather) when it’s unloaded.
My computer gets put to sleep when I’m not using it, which lowers its power consumption significantly. El-Hazard’s processor consumes 8W when active–the hard drive uses more electricity than the motherboard does.
Standby draw for most of the devices in the house is pretty low. I probably don’t use $1 of electricity per week keeping everything on standby. Then again I don’t have 5,000 chargers and devices plugged in, either.
I used to have arguments with my Dad about how much it cost to run a fan next to my bed whenever I was sleeping. I don’t know how many times I pulled out a quarter and told him, “Here, this’ll pay for this week!” *sigh* I miss him.
Ah, the old quarter trick. I used that a few times when some Adam Henry would try to go all “taxpayer” on me after I had finished dealing with him on patrol.
I’d pull a nickel out of my pocket, toss it on the sidewalk in front of him, and leave, saying over my shoulder, “well, Mister Taxpayer”, I’ve refunded the amount of taxes you paid on my salary. Have a good day.”
Strange, of all the smart-ass remarks I made to A/Hs over the years that I got “talked” to about, by the Sergeant later, that stock response was never one of them.