P3 P4400 Kill A Watt Electricity Usage Monitor

This product works as expected. I purchased this unit to make an analisis about parasit power consumption in my electronic appliances in home.I discover the following:- the lcd requires 180 ~ 230 watts. After going to standby or shutdown, the tv use 60 watts for 3 minutes. This is to cool down the lcd lamp for protection (fans and additional circuit works for this time). Can be a mistake if I remove the AC cable power or enterely shutdown the tv without allow this process to finish. Good discover. After this 3 minutes, the standby mode on the monitor only requires 05. to 1w.- my motorola cable system requires the same ammount of power (27 ~ 30 watts) no matter if this unit is ON or off!!!!... all the time is fully powered (because have an internal hard drive). But I believe (wrong!) this unit must save about 50% if is off.. but no!!!!- the blackberry / sony ericson chargers do not drain any power (0W) from AC if the phone itself is not connected. I DON't need to disconect this chargers from the outlets.- My APC Smart UPS 1500 drain 30 WATTS! even when is completely turned off!!!Is better to disconnect this unit from the ac cable!!! amazing!...- My pc (dimension 9150) is a power hungry pc. Because have pentium D (first edition) who requires a lot of power. This pc requires 230 watts but when I play Command Conquer (3D real time strategy) and because I have a HD2900 ATI High Definition card who requires 650 watts PSU. Interesting: when I play the game the power rise from 230 to 300~320 watts!!!!This unit is very usefull to understand how the electronic systems works and if are energy efficient and how you must manage this units to save power and money.Highly recommended, is cheap and you can check your ac freq and exact voltage (i have 128 volts from 127 expected in the ac line)......enjoy and sorry my english

This meter works as expected. I used it to test both standby usage of appliances and devices (TV's not turned on, laptop chargers not plugged in, etc.) and active appliance usage (electric kettle that draws about 12 amps, Microwave, plugged in computer/monitors). The build seems reasonable, but not sure if it will hold up to repeated plug-unplug cycles. So far it has not been an issue.

Don't bother buying the more expensive models of the Kill-A-Watt. The P3 model is more than enough. It will give you how many watts your device is drawing, as well as the number of amps, number of volts (at the outlet), and frequency (60 hertz). It also keeps track of the total number of kilowatts hours your device has used during the length of time you have been monitoring the device. To calculate how many kilowatt hours your device will use in a month, you just need a bit of simple math:(Watts/1000) x (number of hours device is turned on per day) x (31 days) = Kilowatt hours per monthExample for a 100 watt light bulb that is left on continuously for a month:(100/1000) x 24 x 31 = 74.4 kwh per monthNote that a kilowatt is 1000 watts and 1 kilowatt hour is the equivalent of ten 100 watt light bulbs burning for 1 hour.Electricity is billed in kilowatt hours so you can find out how much each kilowatt hour costs by contacting your electric company or looking on their website. Your electric bill should tell you how many kilowatt hours you used in a given month. It is easy to calculate how many tons of CO2 your electricity use produces. The EPA website estimates 6.8956 x 10-4 metric tons of CO2 per Kilowatt hour. I pay for 100% wind power through my utility, which only adds about $1.80 per month to my electric bill and we use a lot of electricity (about 1200 kwh per month). Part of this large number is the fact the landlord installed an electric water heater (a gas water heater would be much more efficient).I finally ordered a P3 Kill-A-Watt and wish I had ordered one 10 years ago because it would have paid for itself many times over. If you check various items in your home, you will be surprised at how much electricity things use. Many electrical devices draw 2 to 5 watts or more when they are turned off but left plugged in! When you count how many things you have plugged in in you home, this adds up. I now unplug things I am not using.One of the biggest energy wasters is the common light bulb, which wastes 98% of its energy as unwanted heat. For comparison, I have an old style Sony 32 inch TV (picture tube, not flat panel) that draws 150 watts. A single reading lamp with a common 150 watt bulb uses the same amount of electricity as this large TV. You are much better off using compact fluorescent bulbs which use FAR LESS electricity. Amazon sells GE compact florescent 100 watt (equivalent) bulbs that actually use only 26 watts. (Type "compact fluorescent 100 watt" into Amazon search). The compact florescent GE 60 watt (equivalent) bulbs actually use only 13 watts. These bulbs screw right into your existing lamps and light fixtures and will pay for themselves many times over. The downside of compact florescent bulbs is that they contain a significant amount of mercury (about 5 grams). There are special cleanup procedures you should follow if you accidentally break one inside--open a window, do NOT vacuum--see the EPA's "Cleaning Up a Broken CFL" article for the full procedure [...]Because compact florescent bulbs contain mercury, they must not be disposed of in regular trash. Call your local municipality to learn how to dispose of items that contain mercury--many municipalities have recycling programs for mercury containing items. A much better alternative to compact florescent bulbs are LED bulbs (do not contain mercury) which are a new technology and consequently expensive at the moment but prices will come down with time.A final note on the Kill-A-Watt regarding computer power supplies. I build computers and, prior to owning a Kill-A-Watt, ended up buying much larger (and more expensive) power supplies than I really needed because of some misleading information on the web. For example, the computer I am typing this on with a good Intel CPU and an expensive video card draws 130 watts at idle and 270 watts with both CPU and video card fully loaded (running Prime95 and 3DMark simultaneously). Unfortunately, I put a 750 watt power supply in this computer, which was totally unnecessary. It is important to purchase a high quality power supply, but you definitely don't need a 750 watt power supply for a computer that draws 270 watts at full load.