One of the things a lot of folks wonder when they look at their electric bill is, "Where the heck is all my money going?" Which appliances are using more than they should, or just more than you think they do? How can you tell?

It's easy now with the Kill-a-Watt meter by P3 International. This thing only costs about $24, but could save you some serious money by pointing out the electricity hogs in your house. This is also an extremely valuable tool for anyone trying to figure out the wattage requirements for a backup generator.

When the price for electricity shot up last year and we decided we needed to do something about it, I started looking for a tool to tell me how much power the various things in our house were really using. Some things, like the light bulbs, weren't a big problem because they have a rated wattage and I'm willing to take those at face value.

But other things in the house, like our refrigerator and freezer, the computers, and so on, aren't so easy. Take the refrigerator: you can read the spec sheet and see how many watts it pulls when it's running. But how long does it run during the day? How many watts does it use overall, or on average? The manual can't tell you that, because it's going to vary depending on what setting the refrigerator's on, the temperature in your house, etc.

So, after digging around on the internet, I found the Kill-a-Watt meter by P3 International, which sells on Amazon for around $24 - that was actually about the lowest price I'd found for it (disclaimer).

Using the Kill-a-Watt is absurdly simple: unplug the device you want to check, plug the Kill-a-Watt into the outlet, then plug the device into the Kill-a-Watt. The meter will then start keeping track of how many watts are currently being drawn, how long the device has been plugged in, and the total watts used (so you can figure out the watts/hour by dividing the total watts by the time).

It will also tell you some other good information, like the exact voltage from the outlet. But the main part for me is counting watts.

My wife just shook her head and muttered as I went around the house testing things. And just a tip for testing devices that may have hard to reach plugs or outlets in tight quarters: plug a 3-prong extension cord into a convenient outlet, plug the Kill-a-Watt into that, then plug in your device.

While I still have to test some things, I made a couple of interesting discoveries. For one thing, I found out that the refrigerator and freezer didn't use nearly as much electricity as I thought they would: over a 24 hour period, the fridge uses 70 watts/hour, and the freezer uses 80. So that works out to a bit over 50 kWh for the refrigerator per month (or around $5, depending on the cost of your electricity), and about 60 kWh for the freezer (or around $6 per month). Not too bad, and a lot better than I thought!

I checked our Econo-Heat radiant panel heaters, which are rated at 425 watts. However, when I checked them with the Kill-a-Watt, they actually came out to 395, which was nice.

The computer we use as a home office server was another surprise: this thing has four hard drives, half a dozen cooling fans, a pretty powerful AMD CPU and ATI graphics card, and a 21" CRT monitor (not one of the newer LED/LCD models), and it was only pulling 250 watts (the power supply is rated at 500 watts)! So, that was the good news. But for a variety of reasons, we often leave the machine on overnight, so I figure it's costing us somewhere around $20/month to run. The solution: make sure I get my butt downstairs every night to shut it down!

By comparison, our laptops use about 25 watts, which is a surprise in a way since they're as powerful CPU-wise as the server machine, just without the extra hard drives and big CRT monitor. So when you're shopping for a computer, add power consumption to your list of considerations: I figure each of our laptops costs about $1 in electricity each month! And that savings can definitely add up over time.

And as I mentioned earlier, if you're looking into getting a backup generator for your home, it's very important to know just how much power you really need. The Kill-a-Watt can tell you: you no longer have to rely on estimates that may be way off for your particular needs.

The best part of the Kill-a-Watt is that it's cheap! It's only about $24, but can potentially save you a lot more than that by pointing out energy hogs in your house.

The only real downside to it is that you can't use it on the biggest electricity users in your home: your air conditioning, furnace, hot water heater, or stove (it doesn't handle 240V appliances).

But still, the Kill-a-Watt can help you bring some of your other energy hogs under control, and for me the price was well worth the peace of mind.

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