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Ever get your electric bill and wonder to yourself, 'How can that be right, what is using so much electricity?' Of course, there's no way to know for sure, so you vow to turn off the lights when you leave rooms and not leave anything on you don't have too. But how much of a difference is it really going to make? Well, now you really can know, exactly.
The Kill-A-Watt is an electronic gadget to monitor electricity usage. It's easy to use, all you need to figure out what's costing so much is the Kill-A-Watt and your electric bill. For instance, I just figured out that it would cost me $5.03 to run my laptop all day, every day for a month. A lamp with a 60 watt bulb costs me about half of that. It made me wonder what it costs to leave my desktop running all the time, it's got two plugs, one for the computer and one for the monitor.
Here's how it works:
Just plug the Kill-A-Watt into the wall socket where you're going to plug in your appliance; your laptop, lap, tv, XBOX, whatever. Then plug your appliance into the Kill-A-Watt. Right away it begins automatically monitoring the electricity passing through it. There are five buttons on the Kill-A-Watt. The first four are for the technically inclined and the last one is for the rest of us. The first four include: Volts, Amps, Watts & Vrms Arms and the last button has Hz & Power Factor (Watts/Vrms Arms). If you know what any of those first four mean then you'll be glad their there. If you don't, don't worry the last button is just for you and me.
The last button gives two pieces of information, Time and KWH. The time is how long the appliance has been being monitored for and the KWH is how many Kilowatts an Hour (KWH) the appliance is using. Here's how I used that information to determine how much it costs to leave my laptop running all the time:
- My laptop showed .08 KWH, that's Kilowatts used per hour, after 1 hour. My most recent electric bill shows it costs me $0.0845 (just over eight cents) for per KWH. So for one hour it costs me less than one cent, $0.00676 (.08 KWH x $0.0845 per KWH) to power my laptop.
- That means it would cost me about sixteen cents per day, $0.16224 to be exact ($0.00676 for one hour x 24 hours). $5.03 all day for an entire month ($0.16224 per day x 31 days). $59 for an entire year.
That's it, it's that easy. If my desktop PC runs twice as much that means I could shave at least $10 off my electric bill every month just between my desktop PC and my laptop. Do you fall asleep with the TV on, how much could you save if you didn't do that? Have more lamps on in the living room than you need? Running two or even three TV's in the house at the same time? Charging three or four cell phones in the same house? Cutting down your electric bill has never been easier.
Get your own Kill-A-Watt here or take your money and electricity savings to the next level with the more advanced Kill A Watt EZ located here.
Kill-A-Watt
Kill-A-Watt-EZ
Tags: electricity, money, Kill A Watt |
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