Tracking the Power Consumption of Your Gadgets

Last week Brady posted on the tools one can use to lower your power usage. The problem for most people is that they are very dimly aware of what uses power. Jamais Cascio of WorldChanging points out that cars with realtime MPG usage displays tend to make people more efficient drivers. Certainly when I am in a car with a MPG meter, I usually treat it as a little game where the objective is to get as high a MPG rating as possible.

This “making the invisible visible” idea can be applied to electricity as well, there are a numerous tools on the market that let you find out in realtime how much electricity one appliance, or the entire house is using.

The simplest tool is a Kill-A-Watt; available from plenty of online stores for around $40. You plug them in and they tell you what that device is using at this given point in time. More general versions are The Energy Detective and Energy Monitor house meters, both of which will report the current, average, and peak power use of your house. If you have variable pricing, future versions of these products could give you the ability to show you exactly what your power use is costing you in realtime.

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