Jon Peddie Research - a technically oriented marketing, research, and management consulting firm in the graphics industry.

Kill a watt

Posted by Jon Peddie on November 19th 2009 | Comments Closed
Categories: Hardware Review
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Every month the electric bill comes in and every month it’s higher than you think it should be and every month you say we have to find out what is using all that power, it can't be just the PC I sit in front of all day, someone is leaving lights on or something. And then you go back to reading your email and tapping out tweets. At quitting time, you get up and some folks turn off their PC, others have a sleep mode set and want to have instant on when they come back so they leave the machine on, but sleeping - or so they think.

I am a fanatic about turning things off - and still, even with 5KW of solar cells powering JPR HQ and Mt. Tiburon Testing Labs, there's an electric bill and it's higher than I think it should be.

You can't call the electric company (PG&E in our case - they don't make house calls - but they will give you advice - turn stuff off. Thanks.) You could call an electrician and he or she will do what you can do for $30, instead of $300 an hour. Get a Kill a Watt meter ($29.95 at CableOrganizer.com) and plug it in the wall and then plug your stuff into it and take a look at the power consumption - how easy is that?

So we did that. On my rig which is a high performance PC with three monitors, an audio amp, and two external disks, running off a UPS battery backup system, the wall draw is 400 W. I didn't know that and if someone had asked me I would have guessed it to be 300 W max. When I quit and turn off the PC there's still a draw of ~ 150 W or so - the monitors in sleep mode. Then I turn off the UPS so all the little cube supplies get shut down - and guess what - even turned off there is 40 W being used. Where? I haven't a clue, maybe the UPS isn't fully shut off and there's a trickle charge running - hell of a trickle at 40 W.

Kill a Watt with mini extension cord

On another workstation here, with a similar setup, three monitors, external disks, amp, etc. There is no UPS on two other systems, which are used for testing and non-essential daily stuff, so when we’re finished with them, the master switch on the power strip is switched off and their consumption goes to zero. A master switch off seems to be the only solution.

What do we think?

We would have never known if we hadn’t gotten a Kill a Watt meter. The meter will show line voltage, amperage, Watts, and most interestingly KW/hr – the thing the utility company charges you by. My rig which is consuming ~400 W instantaneously, is telling the utility company it’s sucking 40 KWH. This is shocking news, a wakeup call.

The only down side element of the meter is that you have to shut down your appliance and unplug it, then plug it into the meter, and then the meter into the wall. Sometimes that can be inconvenient depending on what else is plugged in and so we use mini extension cords, which is one on the best inventions since soft pretzels, if you’ve got a bunch of cubes, you need mini extension cords.

The other problem with the meter is in order to not contribute to the problem (of unwanted power consumption) it uses a passive LCD screen, which is a little difficult to see sometimes, especially at a wall socket where there may not be much light, so we’ve found you have to use a flashlight to see what’s going on.

However, if you’re annoyed by your creeping upward electric bill and want to get to the root of the problem, the Kill a Watt meter is a must have in your tool kit.