P3 International P4460 Kill A Watt EZ Electricity Usage Monitor
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Tools and Hardware Reviews of P3 International P4460 Kill A Watt EZ Electricity Usage Monitor
Customer Review: Find out for sure what your gadgets really cost
Summary: 5 Stars
After hearing all the hype on TV about how much energy all my chargers were using just sitting there, I decided to find out for myself.
The Kill A Watt is easy to use. Just input what your electric rate is and you can find out instantly what that charger costs (when charging or just sitting there plugged in). Turns out my chargers only used pennies a year when not being used and only a little more when charging. Not worth the trouble to keep unplugging them.
You get the cost by hour, day, week, month and year. For a device that cycles on and off just leave it plugged in for say 24 hours and you can see what was actually used and a projection for any of the time frames above. I found out our small freezer was only using $6.84 a month, well worth the savings and convenience of having a freezer.
The only drawback is that the monitor plugs directly into the wall which can make it a little hard to read. The easy solution is using a short (3 prong) extension cord to get it away from the wall. Even if you do unplug it the data is retained until you press the reset button.
Pressing reset does not erase the rate...easy to change ...as the rates go up and up.
Customer Review: Find out how much you are spending on electricity.
Summary: 5 Stars
When I bought this I had recently moved into my first house. I never had to pay for electricity so I didn't know how much I would be spending, but I knew that I didn't want to pay a lot. This tool allowed me to identify devices that were not energy efficient so that I can replace them if I wanted to. The only thing you need to do is program in your electric rate. After that, you will get a good amount of data about any device you plug in to the Kill A Watt. Useful data includes exactly how much energy a specific device uses and how much it will cost to run for a day/month/year. It has held up pretty well over the years except for the plastic cover in front of the LCD. That has since come off (after two years). It looks like it was just glued into place so I guess that was to be expected eventually. I would recommend this if you are looking to save money on electricity and want to find those power draining devices.Customer Review: Five Star, But You'll Find More Positive Status Quo Than Negative
Summary: 5 Stars
We got ours last night and got down to business. Serious home-economics business. The big ones I was worried about were entertainment center with Wii, stereo, etc. "on idle", a laptop station in another room that is often left on and then finally I just installed a window A/C unit in our bedroom to avoid paying for all-night whole-house A/C when we are only in one room (childless couple as you may have imagined).
Anyhow, the entertainment center turned out to be costing us something like $15...per year. A buck and change a month. Not worth the hassle of fooling with, but I did put the Wii, amp, preamp and various disc players on a single switch on our uber-power supply in order that we can squelch even that.
I did some preliminary stuff around the house...lots of stuff like *newer* cell phone chargers draw almost literally nothing. I think it was $1.76 per YEAR *when charging* for our cell phone chargers...a pittance at cents a month. When phones are not plugged in, our chargers drew only LED power...i.e. unregisterable as it was less than one-tenth of a cent an hour.
So...mostly just confirmation that a lot of the potential "vampires" out there really aren't.
BUT...WOW...in some cases, you must be careful...
We stuck our Bunn coffeemaker in the thing. The numbers started ratcheting up...fifty dollars per year...seventy...one hundred and twenty...one hundred and fifty... OH MY GOODNESS...
The Kill A Watt EZ works on averaging over time, I realized we had *just* turned this thing on and it was going from cold to "heat water up - QUICK!" mode...in other words, drawing lots of power. That said, while Bunn coffeemakers I believe make the best tasting coffee and quick, they do the "quick" part of that by leaving the water heater on standby mode, always heating the water up as it cools.
Naturally, I have always wondered about how much that sucker costs per year. I think I will feed it some water and let it run for a few days to get an averaged yearly cost. Should be interesting and if Amazon lets me I will report back.
Secondly, another issue: I plugged this thing into our turned-off Oster blender...this is one of the classic vintage style blenders, if that matters at all...and it was reporting something like $4.75 per month, IDLE. Weird.
Then, after a bit, that number started dropping...and dropping...and dropping.
Perhaps when it first starts, there is some big surge that runs through it that was taking a while to be diluted by the draw-per-minute averaging in the Kill A Watt EZ.
Anyhow, I really think that thing uses nothing when plugged in and idle.
*** The important point to the blender example is that there will be a temptation to perform quick-hit analyses on your appliances, but this is not always the best strategy. This thing will give an accurate yearly cost for something that draws consistently, but anything that has a weird spike when first plugging it in or that turns on and off in terms of draw, like a Bunn coffee maker's water heater or a window A/C unit that blows cheap fan constantly, but turns on it's power-consuming compresser here and there must be left on for a while to get that averaging going. That is the only way you'll get an accurate and realistic actual-use cost. ***
Microwave was also basically nothing year-long when not in use...I think it was one dollar a year, maybe. It was apparently just powering it's little calculator-style LCD display, and that was it. The power gets sucked during cooking, but how many minutes per day are you doing that?
A floor fan costed $11...per year...to run continuously. The way we were using it, it was probably costing us $4.50 a year...and to think I used to get upset if one of us left it on all day. HA!
My InFocus projector (800x600 DLP projector) draws 1 cent per hour. Well, wow, that shocked me. I left that on for a while and it still reported 1 cent per hour. Good stuff! I am sure they will come out with LED projectors that use 1 cent per 10 hours, but until that time, I have no good reason to switch or upgrade...power is cheap.
(Oh, forgot to mention, power is 12 cents per kWh where I live at the moment...price your own accordingly).
Oh, that window A/C unit is - I think - about 8,000 BTU and came in at thirty-six cents per night. I am sure our A/C for the house was running at least dollar a night, judging by our bill, so this should save us 60% (36 cents instead of a buck) of about half of our bill (since 8 hrs we use A/C wall unit, 8 hrs we use whole-house and 8 hrs it is OFF completely during the day when we are gone). So 30% savings right off the bat...and that will pay for the A/C wall unit very quickly.
In the final analysis, there wasn't much adjustment made. This thing did not really directly pay for itself monetarily, but in terms of peace-of-mind, it definitely helped. I think our major expense is air conditioning, and after two months of our bill jumping over 50%, I am hoping the use of the window unit solves our energy "crisis." I sure couldn't find anything else (plugged in anyways, hardwired is another story) that seemed to draw anywhere near significant amounts of power.
The Kill A Watt EZ was worth it for me as a "peacemaker" - both with myself and with my wife. The peace-of-mind was easily worth the thirty bananas it costed, and the hour-day-month-week-year calculations are WELL worth the ten or twelve more bones you pay for the "EZ" model over the regular P4400...if I had to do it all over again, I'd still pick the P4460...well worth the hassle savings. The criticisms about it being hard-to-read and the solution to stick it on an extension cord (I used a power strip, which was perfect as it was short and highly portable versus a big bulky three-prong extension cord) are both spot on.
Well done, P3, for a great product. Our "vampire hunt" didn't turn up any convincing vampires, but it did ease our minds about them and allowed us to better focus our energy saving...well...energies.
Customer Review: Found out my refrigerator isn't as much of an energy hot as I thought.
Summary: 5 Stars
We bought this and plugged the refrigerator into it. (Actually, we got a high-capacity extension cord to plug into the wall, plugged the kill-a-watt into the extension cord, then plugged the refrigerator into the kill-a-watt so we could reach it easily.)
We entered in our price per kwH, $.103 or just about 10 cents, left it plugged in for a couple of days and found out the refrigerator only costs $8/month to operate. Not terrific, but not horrible enough to make replacing it a priority.
I WAS planning on buy a new refrigerator, but now I think I'll wait.
Public Libraries should rent these out. I may donate mine to the local library after I'm finished checking other appliances.
Customer Review: Frustrating design, poorly made
Summary: 2 Stars
Poorly made... mine had a defective LCD display right out of the package.
Bad design - because of the way they shaped the device, it will cover BOTH of the outlets in a standard wall socket. Had they moved the plug part on the back an EIGHTH of an inch lower, it would have been fine, leaving the other outlet free. Incredibly frustrating... want to measure one device when there's two things plugged into an outlet? Sorry, you're out of luck... you have to move other devices to other outlets in your room which can be really inconvenient, if not impossible.
And as others have pointed out, it's virtually impossible to read the UNLIT display... and it goes blank when you pull it out of the wall since they didn't include a battery backup.
All-in-all, a very frustrating product not worth the money.