{"id":536,"date":"2009-06-28T10:58:58","date_gmt":"2009-06-28T17:58:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/?p=536"},"modified":"2009-06-28T10:58:58","modified_gmt":"2009-06-28T17:58:58","slug":"where-my-watts-go","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/?p=536","title":{"rendered":"Where my watts go"},"content":{"rendered":"

I like to conduct experiments and measure things. My monthly electricity bill tells me how many kilowatts I’m consuming, but not at a very interesting or useful granularity. Which devices consume the most? Where could I make the most impact, in terms of turning things off or putting them on timers? What I really want is the equivalent of top<\/a>, but reporting electricity consumption instead of CPU usage, for all currently active processes (devices).<\/p>\n

Since no such thing exists, I instead went out and bought a Kill A Watt<\/a>, which monitors all consumption of anything that is plugged (through it) into the wall. This is a nifty device; not only does it give you instantaneous consumption, but it will also record the total usage over time. The packaging contained a bit of over-selling, though:<\/p>\n

\nPerfect for detecting voltage drops and brownout conditions before they damage delicate equipment.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Perfect, that is, if you’re sitting there ready to yank it out of the wall if the line quality drops below 120 V. It doesn’t have any automatic shutoff or power surge protection.<\/p>\n

Once I got the Kill A Watt, I went around the house plugging everything I could find into it. Here are some of the highlights of what I learned:<\/p>\n

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