I recently purchased a Kill-A-Watt electric meter, which is a device you can use to measure how much energy an electrical appliance is using. I used my kill-a-watt around both my and my parent's house (my Dad was really interested too), and took some readings. Some were surprising, others were not. It's worth noting that large appliances (TVs, refrigerators, computers) often have a spike in power usage immediately when they are turned on, but usage quickly drops once the startup time has passed. I have tried to note the startup spike where I can, but it is brief and it can be hard to get a reading.

I found it interesting that on a CRT TV screen, the power usage changes depending on what is on the screen. For example, an image with a lot of bright white uses more power than a dark image. For a rear projection, LCD, or plasma TV, this situation is probably different.

We tested my parent's refrigerator for an hour to measure how many kilowatt-hours (kWh) it used. Because it cycles on and off, this gives a better understanding of it's usage over time. Over 60 minutes, keeping the door closed the whole time, the compressor cycled on and off twice, and overall it used 0.08 kWh.

I've decided to keep monetary cost out of the equation, because the real cost of energy goes way beyond how much you pay your electric company each month.

Here's a table of my readings. I'll be adding more as I take them. If you have an idea for something you'd like measured, let me know!

Specs on the Shuttle SN25P are:

• Athlon x2 (Dual Core) 4200+
• 2GB RAM
• ATI Radeon X800XL Video Card
• 250GB SATA Hard drive