Home Power Measurement for the Curious Student

By Dale Taylor (Intel) (53 posts) on December 12, 2008 at 6:18 pm

Home Power Measurement for the Curious Student

In college my professors used to post some assignments as optional listing them as applying to the “Curious Student”.   Being one of those curious types I thought many might find power measurement something interesting to learn about.  I’ve found a tool anyone can use to measure the power consumed by various appliances around your home.  I use it to measure how various settings I am using on my computer systems are working and thus reduce the power consumed by my network and systems. 

The “Kill A Watt” is a tool which measures the power consumed by whatever is plugged into it.  This device lets you measure the power used providing 8 different readings.  Voltage (Volt); Frequency (Hz); Current (Amp); Volt Amps (VA); Watts(watt); Power Factor (PF); Killowatt Hours (KWH); and Elapsed Time

By plugging the power strip your computer, monitor and local hub are plugged into, you can measure the power consumed by all devices on the circuit.  Using the time period of your choice you can measure just how much power your setup is consuming.  You can also determine how much the electricity is costing you to power your workstation. 

In rough numbers my setup works out like this

Laptop:            from 20 to 40 watts due to load and battery charge state

Desktop:          from 175 to 200 watts depending on load and drive access

Sleep:              At night when everything is off the power used is 10 watts

                        The external USB hub, speakers, and IP Hub all remain on,

                        the PC, Laptop and Monitor are all in a sleep state

In a typical day I measured 2.3 KWH of usage for 24 hours.  Since I pay about 9 cents per KWH, that means a day of computer usage costs me $0.21.  It seems very reasonable that one of my most used tools only costs me $6.40 a month to use. 

This link describes the Kill A Watt device and has a link to download the manual and brochure: http://www.p3international.com/products/special/P4400/P4400-CE.html

You can find the Kill A Watt for sale online for around $20-25 US.

 

Categories: Academic, Uncategorized
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