Kill-a-Watt is fun!

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Posted by Sir Four at 11:26pm Dec 27 '11
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I plan to check most of the electric devices in my house. I can post the results here for anyone interested.

Today I let my phone's battery drain to nothing, then measured it as it charged to full. It took 2 hours @ a fairly steady 6.5 watts. A little math tells me that it takes less than a penny of electricity to fully charge my phone (actually just 0.22¢). I would've guessed significantly more.

Christmas tree lights are little power suckers, though. Four strands draw over 160 watts! I wasn't expecting it to be that high.

Laptop efficiency amazes me, though. My 17 inch Dell idles @ as low as 11 watts, with the screen on! Low brightness, of course, but still. Under load, it goes up to between 40 and 50 watts. Light use stays between 20 and 30. In sleep mode, it draws just over 1 watt. The power brick, when disconnected from the laptop draws 0.0 watts, according to the device, despite the fact that the LED is on. I always figured it was drawing some amount of juice, but it seems to be low enough not to register.

Interesting stuff.

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