Do You Know Where You're Wasting Electricity?

User: dsritt@gmail.com

Vendor: Drive Green - Green Energy Consumers Alliance

Action: 3460 - Monitor Your Electrical Usage

I use a dehumidifier in my basement. Because it uses a compressor, it uses significant electricity while running. I found this out by borrowing a Kill A Watt Monitor from the Franklin Public Library "Library of Things" collection. There are two major ways to use it: 1) Hit the "Watt" button to find out usage (in this case about 500 watts) when the unit is on; 2) use the KWH or killawatt hour button to see how much energy is used over time. The library lets you borrow this for 3 weeks. I ran my humidifier for 2 weeks and doubled the KWH to get a rough energy usage per month. I bought a new dehumidifier and will be saving electricity and using it year round now that it rarely needs to come on during the heating season to keep humidity at a healthy level below 60%. Please note that the Franklin Library only has a partial list on their website and at the time of writing did not include the TOOLS KILL A WATT MONITOR. My dehumidifier was 20+ years old. My next project will be to see how much electricity my 20+ year old refrigerator uses.