New Kill-a-Watt Meter, Timer / Surge Protector / Meter.

I am going to use this with my heat pump water heater. Since I already had a surge protector and a Kill-a-Watt meter, why not add a timer that does all three.

Kill A Watt GT 4480

I thought it was easy to set up and easy to use. Just like the regular kill-a-watt, it tells me how much electricity I have used and the total time. The nice thing is it has both on the same screen. My current setup is; on all the time for the weekend. Weekdays, on from 2am to 9am and 7pm to 9pm. I think I will tweak this as time goes on but the reason for the early morning is to provide the hottest shower for my wife. (That what she wants and that what she will get)

The three buttons on the top are ON, OFF and Auto. Just like a regular timer would have. Programing is done in 15 minute increments. This device is perfect for what I am doing. Now if my local utility ever does Time Of Use billing I am set.

Air Conditioning, this is why power companies don’t like it.

Here is a three day chart of the last few days.

In case you can’t read the little data tags on the bottom; the high bars are during the day and the low bars are at night. Air Conditioning is the “problem”. I am just one house. Imagine all the other houses that have air conditioning. Each one is adding at least 4 kW of extra demand on the power company. Power companies don’t build power plants to meet this demand. They build “Peaking Plants” These plants usually are Natural Gas and cost much more to operate then Coal Power plants. They are cleaner but they are costing you more money. I am not saying you should turn off your air. People can die from excessive heat. I just want everyone to know what is happening. Right now I am using 4.54 kW of electrcity. It is costing me $0.32 an hour to use at that amount, and I am generating 7 lbs of CO2 per hour.

Side note: TED is a great tool to help determine the size of a backup system. Fossil fuel or solar. If you notice, I demanded only 5kW at my highest peak. Granted this was averaged over an hour but you can get data for every second of the day if you wanted too. I am thinking about the generator systems sold at th big box stores. Generac comes to mind. Here is a link to there sizer. Heat Pump, Electric Range, Microwave, Freezer, Sump Pump are the options I select. What does it come back with. 17kW – 22kW generator. Since I have had my TED installed I have NEVER been about 10kW, and if I was above 7kW it was for maybe 5 minutes at most. So I would only get the 10kW unit. Maybe the 8kW unit if I left out the electric stove for the backup circuit panel.