P3 International P4460 Kill A Watt EZ Electricity Usage Monitor , grey

We got ours last night and got down to business. Serious home-economics business. The big ones I was worried about were entertainment center with Wii, stereo, etc. "on idle", a laptop station in another room that is often left on and then finally I just installed a window A/C unit in our bedroom to avoid paying for all-night whole-house A/C when we are only in one room (childless couple as you may have imagined).Anyhow, the entertainment center turned out to be costing us something like $15...per year. A buck and change a month. Not worth the hassle of fooling with, but I did put the Wii, amp, preamp and various disc players on a single switch on our uber-power supply in order that we can squelch even that.I did some preliminary stuff around the house...lots of stuff like *newer* cell phone chargers draw almost literally nothing. I think it was $1.76 per YEAR *when charging* for our cell phone chargers...a pittance at cents a month. When phones are not plugged in, our chargers drew only LED power...i.e. unregisterable as it was less than one-tenth of a cent an hour.So...mostly just confirmation that a lot of the potential "vampires" out there really aren't.BUT...WOW...in some cases, you must be careful...We stuck our Bunn coffeemaker in the thing. The numbers started ratcheting up...fifty dollars per year...seventy...one hundred and twenty...one hundred and fifty... OH MY GOODNESS...The Kill A Watt EZ works on averaging over time, I realized we had *just* turned this thing on and it was going from cold to "heat water up - QUICK!" mode...in other words, drawing lots of power. That said, while Bunn coffeemakers I believe make the best tasting coffee and quick, they do the "quick" part of that by leaving the water heater on standby mode, always heating the water up as it cools.Naturally, I have always wondered about how much that sucker costs per year. I think I will feed it some water and let it run for a few days to get an averaged yearly cost. Should be interesting and if Amazon lets me I will report back.Secondly, another issue: I plugged this thing into our turned-off Oster blender...this is one of the classic vintage style blenders, if that matters at all...and it was reporting something like $4.75 per month, IDLE. Weird.Then, after a bit, that number started dropping...and dropping...and dropping.Perhaps when it first starts, there is some big surge that runs through it that was taking a while to be diluted by the draw-per-minute averaging in the Kill A Watt EZ.Anyhow, I really think that thing uses nothing when plugged in and idle.*** The important point to the blender example is that there will be a temptation to perform quick-hit analyses on your appliances, but this is not always the best strategy. This thing will give an accurate yearly cost for something that draws consistently, but anything that has a weird spike when first plugging it in or that turns on and off in terms of draw, like a Bunn coffee maker's water heater or a window A/C unit that blows cheap fan constantly, but turns on it's power-consuming compresser here and there must be left on for a while to get that averaging going. That is the only way you'll get an accurate and realistic actual-use cost. ***Microwave was also basically nothing year-long when not in use...I think it was one dollar a year, maybe. It was apparently just powering it's little calculator-style LCD display, and that was it. The power gets sucked during cooking, but how many minutes per day are you doing that?A floor fan costed $11...per year...to run continuously. The way we were using it, it was probably costing us $4.50 a year...and to think I used to get upset if one of us left it on all day. HA!My InFocus projector (800x600 DLP projector) draws 1 cent per hour. Well, wow, that shocked me. I left that on for a while and it still reported 1 cent per hour. Good stuff! I am sure they will come out with LED projectors that use 1 cent per 10 hours, but until that time, I have no good reason to switch or upgrade...power is cheap.(Oh, forgot to mention, power is 12 cents per kWh where I live at the moment...price your own accordingly).Oh, that window A/C unit is - I think - about 8,000 BTU and came in at thirty-six cents per night. I am sure our A/C for the house was running at least dollar a night, judging by our bill, so this should save us 60% (36 cents instead of a buck) of about half of our bill (since 8 hrs we use A/C wall unit, 8 hrs we use whole-house and 8 hrs it is OFF completely during the day when we are gone). So 30% savings right off the bat...and that will pay for the A/C wall unit very quickly.In the final analysis, there wasn't much adjustment made. This thing did not really directly pay for itself monetarily, but in terms of peace-of-mind, it definitely helped. I think our major expense is air conditioning, and after two months of our bill jumping over 50%, I am hoping the use of the window unit solves our energy "crisis." I sure couldn't find anything else (plugged in anyways, hardwired is another story) that seemed to draw anywhere near significant amounts of power.The Kill A Watt EZ was worth it for me as a "peacemaker" - both with myself and with my wife. The peace-of-mind was easily worth the thirty bananas it costed, and the hour-day-month-week-year calculations are WELL worth the ten or twelve more bones you pay for the "EZ" model over the regular P4400...if I had to do it all over again, I'd still pick the P4460...well worth the hassle savings. The criticisms about it being hard-to-read and the solution to stick it on an extension cord (I used a power strip, which was perfect as it was short and highly portable versus a big bulky three-prong extension cord) are both spot on.Well done, P3, for a great product. Our "vampire hunt" didn't turn up any convincing vampires, but it did ease our minds about them and allowed us to better focus our energy saving...well...energies.

UPDATE(12-17-15): I thought I lost this, but I finally found it again. I attached it to a printer and forgot about it for many many many months. I definitely got a good data sample from the printer. This things still works fine even after being connected all that time.UPDATE(02-03-14): Still working - the energy savings ($$$) gained from habit/device changes based on the information the Kill-A-Watt Monitor provides has already covered the cost of buying it. In fact, several+ times over!As mentioned in the original review, this Kill-A-Watt Monitor model retains the statistics when it does not have power. Devices that don't use power when turned off will, of course, not power the Kill-A-Watt Monitor and not record any new data. Subsequently, when the device is turned on the monitoring resumes where it left off and the statistics reflect the "always on" energy usage (for the length of time indicated in the meter). When the monitor is connected to a device that uses power when it's turned off (vampire loads such as TVs, microwaves, paper shredders, etc) the statistics will continuously accumulate and will basically be a weighted combination of the energy used when the device is on AND off. Yes, I know this is obvious, but, it's a subtle but important point to recognize.To illustrate this subtlety, think about a microwave oven, a likely vampire device. Microwaves are not used 24 hrs/day (I hope not). If you monitor a microwave only when it's warming/cooking something (the oven is unplugged after each use) the $/year will be very high. This would not reflect the true operating cost because the monitor does not take into account when the oven is plugged in but turned off. But, if you monitor your microwave when it's plugged in all the time (it usually is), the $/year will slowly lower to a more correct value the longer you monitor it. This really shows your usage "habits" and not the always on cost.If saving some $ is your goal, the Kill-A-Watt Monitor saves you NOTHING by using it. YOU have to change your habits on how you use your electrical devices (or don't use lol) to realize the savings. You don't need to have one of these monitors to do that. However, it will certainly tell you where to focus your efforts by revealing the high energy loads you use. You may be surprised on the power usage of some devices too (good and bad surprises :-) ). If it takes buying a device such as this one to help inspire one to change habits/devices, then so be it.If your goal is basically to inspect the specifications of electrical devices (volts/amps/VA/W/power factor, frequency) the Kill-A-Watt Monitor works great.Original Review:I borrowed one of these a while ago and it worked well. I liked that this model retains the values when you remove the monitor from the equipment your testing. The money values (hour, day, week, month, year) are convenient enough. Just remember to hold reset to zero the monitor before testing another piece of equipment (the $/kWh rate you enter does NOT change when you press reset which is a good thing. I would hate to enter than every time before monitoring something).It's best to use a small (6" long) extension on the back of the monitor to make it easier to plug into your outlets when other plugs are in the way. Otherwise you'll have to remove all plugs in the outlet as the Kill-A-Watt will cover the other sockets.