One week with the Kill a Watt

So, Jon and I decided that we should start tracking our energy usage to get an idea of how much energy we were using a month.  There are quite a few home monitoring systems out there.  We went with the Kill a Watt. 

It is a great little device that lets you plug in any device that you want to monitor.  It tracks power consumption, power quantity, voltage and current.  I don't know that much about voltage and current so I was only interested in the kWh.  If you remember from my energy post, at most the farmhouse will be getting 100-150 kWh per month.  And on average the typical American family consumes 750-800 kWh per month. 

The first thing we tracked was our tv.  And when I say tv, I mean also our Wii, DVR and blu ray player which is all plugged in to the same outlet.  I love our DVR, but man, that thing is on all the time!  So after 168 hours or one week exactly our tv setup used 9.98 kWh. 

So, in one month of typical tv usage we would be using approximately 40 kWh.  That's almost half of our electricity for one month on the farm!  We weren't planning on getting cable when we moved to the farm and this just reaffirms our decision.  Number one, I get addicted to reality tv shows very easily and number two, we won't have any time! 

Jon also bought four of Practecol remote control outlet strip.  One of the things that's recommended to help cut energy usage is to control phantom power.  Phantom power is the power that your appliances are sucking up without them being turned on.  With these power strips there is a remote control that lets you turn off the appliance when walking out of the room.  The next thing on our list to monitor is our computers.  We hardly ever turn off our computers, so this should be interesting!