P3 International P4400 Kill A Watt Electricity Usage Monitor
P3 International P4400 Kill A Watt Electricity Usage Monitor
Watts killing you? Electricity bills are rising and your lights and appliances can be draining your wallet. Now you can analyze and reduce costs. Find out what appliances are actually worth keeping plugged in. Simply connect these appliances to the Kill A Watt, and it will assess how efficient they really are. The Large LCD display will count consumption by the Killowatt-hour, same as your local utility. You can calculate your electrical expenses by the day, week, month, even an entire year. Also check the quality of your power by monitoring Voltage, Line Frequency, and Power Factor. Now you ll know if it is time for a new refrigerator or if that old air conditioner is still saving you money. With the amazing Kill A Watt you ll know Watts” killing you. Now do something about it! Operating Voltage – 115 VAC Max Voltage – 125 VAC Max Current – 15 A Max Power – 1875 VA Unit Dimensions – 5 1/8H x 2 3/8 W x 1 5/8 / Weighs 5 ounces
User Ratings and Reviews
3 Stars Needs some translation
It really does what is says it does… but that is pretty limited. I know this is the stripped down model but it really doesn’t translate your energy usage and project what it will cost you for the month/year. You get a usage and a timer (to get the kilowatts per hour) and then you do the math throughout to make sense of it. In short… you end up spending a lot of time and math to do a home energy review! I guess I was expecting more, esp. in product documentation with the unit.
5 Stars great for energy misers
I never would have guessed my coffee maker uses 1000 watts when it’s brewing! This is great gadgit that helps me be a bit greener.
5 Stars Kill A Watt
In preparation to purchase an emergency home generator I wanted to assure that I would buy enough emergency power without going overboard. After reviewing several different testers I decided on the Kill A Watt P3. It works flawlessly and as advertised. Cudos to Kill A Watt P3.
4 Stars Validates common sense electrical stewardship
This is an interesting little gadget that provides some really useful information. It comes packaged in a no-fuss little cardboard box with minimal documentation. You would be best served to look online for explanations of “Power Factor” and the like. That said, the device is not complex, but some documentation would have been nice.
The unit is quite large, and covers both outlets in a standard twin outlet wall gang. for this reason, I purchased a little mini-extension cord so I could get readings from devices plugged into power strips, or devices behind sofas etc.
One interesting thing to note is that the device needs to track usage over a week or so to give a good indication of kWh usage. Sure, you get an instantaneous reading of how many watts something uses, but that’s misleading. After day one, the reading was 1.9 kWh per day for the fridge. After one week, the average use was only 1.4 kWh per day. In my area, that’s around $40 per year for the fridge.
So with this product you’re either going to find out that you’re wasting a lot, or that you’re not wasting as much as everyone would have you believe. Either way, this product is a good way to validate which category you fall into. My own measurements have found that what matters the most is how long an appliance stays on, not how power-hungry it is. For instance, a kettle boiled twice a day at 1600 watts will consume far, far less in a year than a ceiling fan that is left on 12 hours a day, every day.
3 Stars Simple, and works
Does what it says it does, however it has two design faults that make using it more cumbersome than it needs to:
1. The plug is backwards such that when you add this to an outlet it covers the 2nd outlet.
2. The numbers that are calculated are only displayed when the device is plugged in which can make it a pain to read in some applications.
