The Seattle Public Library has Kill-A-Watt's to borrow. A Kill-A-Watt is a device that you can plug other electronic devices into and it will tell you how much electrical power it uses. I've known about these for a while, but it's not relly worth buying at around $25, so it's really nice that they can be rented from the library.

Over the past several days, I've been plugging all of our electronics into it to see how much power they consume. While electricity is very inexpensive here at around $0.05 per kWh, it's still cool to know how much electricity our electronics are using.

We weren't able to measure any high-voltage appliances, but certainly our refrigerator and oven use a lot of electricity. Of the appliances we were able to measure, our microwave and vacuum use the most power when in use, but we don't use them very often, so they don't account for a very large portion of our electrical consumption.

I was most interested in finding out how much standby power our devices used when turned off. Over time, these phantom loads from TVs, microwaves, and video game systems can add up to quite a lot of power. Some estimates are that standby power costs Americans $3 billion annually and accounts for as much as 10% of residential electrical consumption.

We found that the biggest things that steal electricity when not in use our CD player (particularly the clock), computer equipment (especially the modem and router), and our cable box. In fact, somehow just the clock on our CD player uses more power than our laptop does when powered on.

Contrary to things we'd heard, many things didn't use electricity when not in use - our cell phone chargers and other electronics chargers didn't show any electric consumption when our devices weren't charging.

Now that we have a better understanding of how much electricity our things use, we'll try to make better decisions about how we use them. For example, it's not very hard to switch off our surge protectors at night when we're not using them, and in doing so we could save over 10% off of our annual electricity bills (we only spend around $157 annually anyway). We'll also likely keep our CD player clock off now that we know how much power it wastes.

Anyway, it's cool that we were able to borrow the Kill A Watt from the library and now we're a little more educated on how we're using electricity.