Most of the energy you consume is done in the home or by transportation. So how much power does your house use? There’s a meter for that! And every home on the grid has one. The energy usage is measured in kilowatt hours. Chances are you already know that as you pay for every single [...]

The cheap answer for how much power a laptop uses is, “It depends on the laptop”. In general you can expect a laptop to use quite a bit less energy than a desktop. The processors in laptops are clocked down to use less energy to ensure longer battery life.

The Kill-A-Watt meter isn’t just great for finding what devices in your house use the most energy, it’s also great for making ice cream! How, you ask? Well it’s always a pain to take the top off and check to see how the icecream is doing. With this meter you can know exactly how close [...]

Awhile back I asked myself, “How much power does an iPad use? What uses the most power on it?”. I hooked a What’s Up meter and ran some tests to see:

For the last few weeks I’ve been driving an electric scooter to work. I’ve got a small solar system that creates 100 watt hours of energy each day. Since my commute isn’t very long (about 3 miles) I figured I’d see if I could commute to & from work with just solar energy pushing me. [...]

Although the adapters that come with Macbook Pros are rated for 85 Watts they rarely use that much energy. A Macbook pro browsing the web typically uses about 40 Watts. You should know that how much energy your computer uses depends a lot on what you’re doing or not doing. For example if I put [...]

The watts up meter is intended for use with rc equipment, but with tolerance of 60 volts the watts up meter can work great for small solar systems as well. The “watts up” is essentially a dc version of the popular kill a watt meter.

Each fridge is different depending on the size and efficiency. I’ve got a 13 cubic foot or so manufactured around 2007. It uses almost 880 watts when you first plug it in, but it only pulls at that level for 10 seconds or so.