A Neat Idea!
Plugged it to the wall socket with the iphone charger on it. Set it 3 hours and pressed the top button. Poof nothing worked. changed all the time configurations, changed wall sockets, changed load nothing. Refuses to start. The cost of the device is $9.99, I guess it would take me another 5 bucks to return it, ended up wasting my time and money on this. Will never ever buy Belkin products again, its not worth a try. I have to give 1 star for this dead device? Amazon needs to start with -ve or black stars to indicate that this is a useless product.
it work well for that. that said, I have a simple DIY solar electric system I’m setting up and was intending to use this to monitor how much power my system was producing, this meter does not seem to read power flowing in reverse. seem the common meter for the DIY grid tie solar crowd is the Kill A Watt. I’ll have to pick one of those up for my usage.
Plug the end into the outlet, and then plug in whatever device you want to test. That’s all there is to it. Then you will know how much it costs to use your toaster, computer, stereo – anything using electricity. What’s the carbon footprint? – push a button. What is the cost per month? per year? – again, push a button. My boss has been bugging all of us to shut off our power strips on the weekends to save electricity. I found out over one weekend that we save a whopping $.32 a year per strip (And the annual cost of running my computer workstation is around $33 a year. A great gift idea for the techno-nut in your family, or anyone interested in finding ways to save money.
All you do is plug it in the outlet then plug in your appliance. Immediately you can see how much it will cost, monthly or yearly, to keep the appliance plugged in but off. I found this to be a terrific feature. It made me realize it was time to put a few things on a power strip so that I can completely turn them off.
When you turn on the appliance you can then get an idea of what it will cost, monthly or yearly, but only if left on 24/7. Very few electrical items in our home are run 24/7. Even the refrigerator only runs periodically. This feature was only helpful in letting me know how different appliances compare. You can leave it connected for 45 minutes and it gives you an average but I am not sure of what. What do you turn on and off during a 45 minute period? Television, for example, is usually watched in half or full hour increments. Computers are rarely turned on/off in a short period of time. There are some devices that do fluctuate during use but that generally depends on how they are used not necessarily over time. And what is a monthly cost, 30 or 31 days? What would have been useful is a 1 hour cost mode. Then you could quickly calculate your own usage and get a better estimate.
Co2. How many of us have a choice of who or what source we buy our electricity from? Unless you are an activist, the only thing this may do is put the guilt on you and convince you to throw away a device which really creates more pollution.
I do think the most important thing we can do to both save money and help the environment is take concern on the items that are wasting energy plugged in but still using electricity. I found one appliance that cost roughly $5 a month plugged in. For that this device is very useful and could very well pay for itself.