Beautiful in its simplicity
My new favorite gadget and means of driving my family crazy is the P4400 Kill A Watt by P3 International. Any appliance or device in your home or office that has an LCD displaying the time or indicating its resting state or awaiting the click of a remote is drawing power. This power is called a phantom load. The P4400 Kill A Watt measures the watts, volts, amps and many other things. I use it to measure the phantom loads around my home and business.
According to my Kill A Watt, the phantom load on my microwave is 5 watts. This means even if I’m not using the microwave, the fact that it is plugged in and telling me the time means it’s costing me $5.90 per year on my electricity bills.
Now I realize that may not sound like much, less than $0.50 a month, right? But here’s the catch, I have at least ten other devices plugged in and drawing power all day, every day even when they’re “off”. So, much to my family’s chagrin, I measured all of the other loads in the house as well. The TV was drawing 21 watts of power when it was “off”, the Wii 4 watts, X-Box 6 watts, DVD player 3 watts, two phone chargers are drawing 3 watts each, the coffeemaker 4 watts, Dust Buster 6 watts and, finally, the power strip in my office with all my equipment plugged into it clocked in at a whopping 13 watts.
With the help of my Kill A Watt, I discovered I was using 68 watts of phantom power daily. On an annual basis, this generates about 307lbs. of CO2 and costs me over $80 a year on my electric bills.
Kill A Watt from P3 International
Of course I’ve simplified things here. I do actually utilize all of these devices, so not every moment they’re plugged in represents a phantom load. But, for the sake of family harmony, I did not measure every device!
The opinions expressed herein are my own and are not meant as an advertisement. I paid for this product with my own funds and received no promotional or monetary incentive for writing this review.
- Cost: About $23
- Payback: About 3.5 months
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