It’s one of the coolest gadgets to hit the world of electricity in quite some time: it’s the Kill a Watt, a electric device that tells you exactly how much energy your energy-guzzling items are, well, guzzling.  Or sipping, if you’re lucky and/or smart enough to have more efficient appliances in your home.

You can see how it works in the picture; you plug the Kill a Watt into the wall, and then plug whatever electric thing you want to measure into the Kill a Watt.  It then tells you how much energy your computer or television or blender is using in Kilowatt hours (among other things), and from there you can calculate the daily, monthly, or yearly cost of each item.  What’s even better, perhaps, is that you can monitor things like how much power it takes to keep your computer on standby all day, or keep your stereo plugged in – they’re still sucking up energy even if they’re off (which is why they’ve been called vampire appliances, as Alys told me this morning).

I found Kill a Watts for sale all over the Internet: Amazon, eBay, ThinkGeek, not to mention the first one I linked to in the post.  And they’re only about $25 – can’t beat that.  I’m thinking that one might not be out of place in our staged Mixson home…

Filed under: I'On Group, Mixson, Urban Sustainability on July 25th, 2008