Let's just say, and this is purely hypothetical because it's never happened to me, that one day you open your mailbox and you get a $300 bill from your local utility for gas and electricity for the last month. After the shock wears off you start to get a little pissed off and you vow to reduce your power consumption. Well, how do you go about doing that?
You've heard about turning the lights off, lowering your thermostat, getting a new refrigerator, turning your computer off, plugging all these little gadgets you rarely use into a power strip since they use a little power whether they're off or not, etc, etc, etc. But how do you know it's really going to make a difference? Do you have a clue how much power your TV, Playstation, Computer, Refrigerator use?
If you're like most of us you really don't know. Well here's a smart $30 purchase: the P3 International Kill-a-Watt Electricity Usage Monitor.
This cool little gadget lets you know exactly how much power your device is using. It displays volts, amps, and wattage.
Now, every "Gadget of the Moment" is something that I have personally used and recommend. One feature of the Kill A Watt really has me puzzled. It's the ability to display Power Factor. So I've noticed something really weird - I have four outlets in my house (old Knob and Tube with some ground wires added by an electrician) where the Kill A Watt displays a Power Factor of almost 0 even though nothing is plugged into it! I've talked to PG&E (my local utility), an electrician, and P3 International (the manufacturer of Kill A Watt) and no one's been able to come up with a good explanation. What's even stranger is that my surge arrester/power strip: APC PF11VT3 11-outlet SurgeArrest with Tel2/Splitter and Coax Protection
(a very cool device in it's own right) shows an overload warning on those outlets.This has been an intermittent problem and I finally got a clue - it only seems to happen when it rains pretty hard. Weird. Anyway, the outlets work fine otherwise but this is really bugging me so if someone has a clue - post a comment and let us know. We'll be eternally grateful.
