P3 International P4400 Kill A Watt Electricity Usage Monitor | 
| Brand: P3 International
List Price: $52.43
Buy New: $16.22
You Save: $36.21 (69%)
New (55)
Rating:  339 reviews
Color: Ivory
Media: Electronics
Autographed: No
Memorabilia: No
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2
Dimensions (in): 11.8 x 3 x 7.3
Weight: 5 oz.
Dimensions: 5 1/8" X 1 5/8" X 2 3/8"
Warranty: 2 years
ETL Approved
Legal Disclaimer: Warranty does not cover misuse of product.
MPN: P4400
Model: P4400
UPC: 633758003605
EAN: 0751549044009
ASIN: B00009MDBU
Availability: Usually ships in 3-4 business days
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| Features:
| • | Electricity usage monitor connects to appliances and assesses efficiency | | • | Large LCD display counts consumption by the kilowatt-hour | | • | Calculates electricity expenses by the day, week, month, or year | | • | Displays volts, amps, and wattage within 0.2 percent accuracy | | • | Compatible with inverters; designed for use with AC 115-volt appliances |
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Connect your appliances into the Kill A Watt, and assess how efficient they are. A large LCD display counts consumption by the Kilowatt-hour just like utility companies. You can figure out your electrical expenses by the hour, day, week, month, even an entire year. Monitor the quality of your power by displaying Voltage, Line Frequency, and Power Factor
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| Customer Reviews: Read 334 more reviews...
 Fascinating gadget July 9, 2005
Phillip Roncoroni (Manhattan, New York)
509 out of 515 found this review helpful
I absolutely love this thing.
Having recently moved out on my own, and generally just enjoying statistics in general, I bought this to monitor my electric costs after two high electric bills in a row. The various results I found were quite surprising.
My air purifier, which I bought here on Amazon, uses 85 watts all the time... 85 * 24 hrs * 30 days / 1000 watts = 61.2kWhr * $0.20 = $12.24 a month.
Well, that's quite a costly monthly addition I never thought of. And that's just the begining.
My Vornado fan uses 45w... my air conditioner, on high 6 (out of 12) spikes up to 1200 watts. Jeez.
My computer, at idle with external drives, uses about 250w. When doing extremely intensive things, like encoding a video, 310w.
My light behind my computer desk, with five, 10-watt bulbs, doesn't actually use 50-watts total. No, it uses 50-watts for the bulbs, PLUS 30-watts apparently just for the light unit to function.
You too will find out all these things you never knew, and possibly save money by cutting out, or replacing energy guzzlers.
The product is also made in China. Just like everything else now.
 How to reduce your power consumption November 3, 2005
Richard Braun (Cambridge, MA United States)
434 out of 446 found this review helpful
Two years ago, my electricity consumption jumped about 40% and I ignored the problem until this fall's rate increases. I wanted to find out what I bought back in 2003 that's still eating power today. Enter the P4400 Kill-A-Watt unit, which is the only low-cost product of its type on the market today. I tried but failed to find its specifications online. So I bought a couple of these things to try them out. Here are the details on what it can do.
* How big is the display: 4 digits.
* What are the front-panel button capabilities: volts, amps, watts, volt-amps, power-factor, frequency (hz), KWH, timer (since reset).
* Does it lose its data in a power failure: yes.
* You have to plug the unit into a nonswitched wall outlet, it can't measure overhead lighting or large appliances.
* It will report the amount of time (hours:min up to 99:59, then hours for about a year) since last reset but won't tell you how much of that time the attached device was powered on.
How did I figure out usage? I created an Excel spreadsheet with the following columns: Device, estimated wattage, estimated hours/month, kilowatts avg/month, measured kwh/day, measured kilowatts, annual cost. I went through the house and inventoried everything I could find, entering it into a row of the spreadsheet. Then I filled in the estimates:
- Hours/month: if I use a TV 3 hours a day, I enter the formula 3*365/12; if I use a treadmill 45 minutes on 10 days a month, the formula is 0.45*10*365/12.
- Kilowatts (average over the month): formula is watts*hours/(24*365/12)/1000. If you have a 60-watt light left on 24/7, you should see the value 0.060; if you have it on a 12-hour timer, you should see the value 0.030.
- Annual cost: formula is kilowatts*365*24*cost. Locally the cost is 13.5 cents so a 100-watt device works out to $118.26 per year.
OK once I have that chart I then plug in the Kill-A-Watt to measure the items that might be chewing up more power than my estimates. For a device that you leave on all the time and which uses a steady number of watts, you can simply measure it for a moment and enter the kwh/day figure into your spreadsheet quickly. For devices like refrigerators or computer monitors or TV sets, you will want to leave the unit plugged in anywhere from a day to a week before entering your kwh/day figure.
The first thing that leaped out at me was how much it costs to run those econo-box desktop PCs. Sure enough, the culprit turned out to be those hot AMD and Intel processors: the tech industry wants you to focus on gigahertz and other performance numbers; they'll never tell you how many watts the computer will draw--because no one asks, not even Consumer Reports. A modern desktop easily draws 100 watts: refer to my earlier figure to see how much that costs, a dollar amount bound to go up in the future. Laptops would save power (though not necessarily enough to make up for the purchase price). Turning off the PC when not in use would save money, but at the cost of productivity: if you value your time, you don't like waiting 2 minutes every time you want to check an email (add those 2 minutes up over the course of a year!)
Bottom line: the Kill-A-Watt device will focus your attention on some of the devices that are costing you unnecessary money, and will definitely change the questions you will be asking as you purchase future household devices. I'd like to see a more feature-laden version, but not if it makes the Kill-A-Watt cost much more than the $25 I paid.
Excellent Product! August 20, 2004
R. Nizlek (Burlington, VT, USA)
228 out of 232 found this review helpful
I absolutely love this product, it's one of the best devices I've aquired in a long time. When I purchased it a few years ago, I paid close to $50, but it was worth every penny. Some of my joy from using the device simply comes from the fact that I'm curious how much energy the products in my home use (I now know, for instance, that my cable box uses 15W of energy whether it is on or off, at that it wastes a little more than 10 kilowatt hours each month, or that my fridge uses 350W when on, or that my laptop only uses 40W - a useful fact to know when I went to buy an inverter to use it in my car), but it can also be used to save energy (I found that hitting the switch on the surge supressors of my computers at night can save me almost $5 a month off my electric bill). Additionally, it's interesting to find out where all the power you use goes, and even what members of the family use the most electricity (you could do a side by side comparason of a child's computer with yours).
Even though I've had my Kill-A-Watt for years, I still take it out regularly to test any new equipment in my home. I know my cell phone charger uses 4 W, my regular battery charger 5 W, and my IC3 15 minute battery charger 73 W.
Surely most will not have as much fun with this unit as I do, but it can be both practical and enjoyable for people such as myself or those looking to save some money off their electric bill. It's also an asset for anyone off-grid, who is generating their power with solar energy or by other renewable means.
 Works, but could be much more useable April 15, 2007
L. Harris (Winter Haven, FL USA)
89 out of 105 found this review helpful
This little guy does what it's supposed to do. The amount of information you gather with it and what you do with that information is up to you. I commend anyone who takes energy conservation seriously enough to use this device and modify his usage based on what he learns. I've been energy-conscious for years, so I haven't come across any new ways to reduce my electric usage, but maybe I will some day. I did learn that once I turn a fan on the speed doesn't have much affect on the power consumed, so I've turned one up now. I guess that means the Kill A Watt has encouraged me to use more electricity. LOL I also used it to check the voltage drop when I turned a high wattage device on, which was interesting.
One of the more interesting experiments I did with it was to test the power consumption of my audio system. Amplifiers are labeled with the standard power consumption labels, but their actual power consumption varies significantly depending on the volumes they have to reproduce. So I plugged the Panamax that protects the front end of my A/V system into the Kill A Watt (the side and rear amps are on other outlets) and found that even though I have three 200-watt amplifiers rated labeled as using about 300 watts each, and a powered sub with a 400-watt amplifier labeled as using 600 watts, I couldn't get the actual power usage up much over 500 watts while watching U-571 (which makes serious use of a subwoofer) at volumes no one would ever tolerate if I had guests, and that includes powering the display and my digital processor. At normal volume levels, I was looking at peaks of around 350 watts.
But here's why I knocked it two stars:
- The prongs on the back are so high that the bottom of the unit blocks the lower receptacle of an outlet if you plug the Kill A Watt in the upper receptacle. If they'd reversed the vertical offsets of the prongs on the back and the receptacle on the front you could use the bottom receptacle while this is plugged in the top.
- The display is on the front of the unit. Since most receptacles are 18" or so off the floor, this means you pretty much have to get on your hands and knees to read the thing. It would have been much better had the display been at a 45 degree angle so you could read it comfortably while looking down on it.
Both of the previous two issues go away if you use a good extension cord to connect the Kill A Watt to the outlet, but both could have been addressed by simple design changes.
- As someone else noted, there is no backlighting, so for many uses a flashlight will come in handy, especially if you don't use an extensions cord.
So with three very minor design changes it would have been a lot more convenient to use.
- I think it's overpriced. Designing a device like this doesn't require an electrical engineering degree. A kid with an interest in electronics could do it and it can't cost more than $2 to make in China. They probably justify the price on the premise that it will save you a lot of money, but realistically you can save just about as much using common sense and turning stuff off or unplugging it when you aren't using it. (If it's warm when you aren't using it, it's wasting energy.) Also, this only works with things you can plug into an outlet. If you're looking to save energy, remember that there are lots of devices in most homes that won't work with this, such as room lighting, outdoor lighting, heat pumps, water heaters, ceiling fans, and so on.
I have learned some very interesting things with it, but nothing yet I can use to save me money. Your mileage may vary.
Great Fun for Obessive Compulsive People February 12, 2006
Lance K. Wig (Asheville, NC)
70 out of 72 found this review helpful
If you are a "Miser," this device will be your best friend. I bought the "Kill-A-Watt" because I suspected that our old Fridge was shooting up the electric bill. I plugged the Fridge into the meter and left it for 3 days. I was very surprised to find out the the fridge was only burning about 1.5 KWH (Kilowatt Hours) per day, which is about what it should.
Now I am going around the house and plugging other appliances in for a couple days. The real shocker was that my "economical" eMachines PC along with a CRT monitor was using more energy than the fridge! The computer was burning almost 2 KWH per day. I made changes to the energy saver software in Windows, so that the monitor automatically shuts off in 10 minutes and the computer hibernates in 1 hour. This has brought the daily consumption down to 1 KWH.
For those of you who don't understand KWH, its a measurement of electric usage by the power company. To be simple, using a KWH is about .08 in our area. So, if you save 1 KWH per day, you save .08 After a month's time, it's about $2.48. After a year it's about $30 bucks. The savings add up over time.
With the Kill-A-Watt, I've found out lots of interesting things:
My Mac Mini with a LCD monitor uses about 1/2 the power of my eMachines Tower with CRT. That's 70 Watts vs. 140 Watts.
My Electric Blanket which I though was "economical" pulls 120 Watts during operation. It actually uses 1 KWH per day. I even found out that the blanket burns 10 Watts when the power switch is off!
I found many "power bandits" in my home. These are devices like cellphones, scanners, routers, modems that have those little black power blocks. Most of these devices use 5 to 10 watts with the power switch off. With the Kill-A-Watt, I was able to find the biggest offenders and plug them into a timer that shuts off each night when they are not in use.
If you are truly obsessive about your electrical bill like me, you can make a nice Excel spreadsheet with all your appliances. You can enter Watts, Kilowatt Hours, Price per hour and than figure if replacing a device would pay for the purchase and how long it will take.
As everyone says in their reviews, "This device will pay for it's self."
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