Daley Ponderings

Peter was nice enough to loan me a Kill-A-Watt for a couple weeks to investigate power usage around our home.  I have thought about buying one before, but borrowing one is certainly better, though it is quite a bit of fun to test out devices to see how much power they use.

I first tried it on our dental water pik, and it is 30 watts when it is being used, and 0 when it is not.  In Pittsburgh (at 11.3 cents per kWh), a 50 watt device running for a minute costs just under a penny.  Our chest freezer runs at 83 watts when it is cooling, and 0 watts when it is not (pretty good, I think).  I let it run for a day and the grand total is 9.4 cents ($3/month).

I suspect our freezer is probably the most energy efficient thing in our house, but so far so good.  I'll have to try it out on our computers and stereo equipment.  Note that I test for the 0 watts when it is off, because lots of devices don't really turn off - Peter said his stereo uses 30 watts when it is on and 20 watts when it is off.