One of my more fun geek gifts this year is a Kill A WATT™ meter. You plug a device into it and it will tell you the instaneous voltage, current, resistivity in addition to the KWH it consumes. I’ve been having a lot of fun with it.

For instance my lamp with 60W light bulb pulls 57W and with a 60W equivalent low-power bulb it pulls 17W. My Vacuum pulls 430W, mobile phone charger 3W and the cat 32W*. My eMac pulls 8W/112W/127W at standby/idle/full load. My laptop pulls 1W/5W/42W/86W standby/charging/idle/full load.

Interestingly enough viewing Microsoft.com on my laptop in IE uses 52W and in Firefox it uses 47W after letting the machine to “settle down” after 30 seconds. I guess Firefox is more efficient :-)

On a practical side I plan to use it to measure the power usage I’m using on various equipment so I can correctly size some UPSs I’m planning to buy.

*OK, I’m joking about the cat.