Kill A Watt EZ Review and More Thoughts on Contributing to Society

I just bought a new Kill A Watt EZ unit at Costco. It was roughly $27 plus tax, which was more than the last one I owned (which I loaned to a friend).

Here's my review of the device.

The Kill A Watt lets you easily determine how much each of our electricity consuming toys costs us to operate. It is especially handy for things that don't always use the same amount of power and is somewhat useful for even the things which do.

For example, a freezer uses more electricity in a hot garage than a cold garage. Further, it turns itself on and off a lot in order to maintain a constant temperature. Ever wonder how much that 60 watt lamp is costing you when you don't even know how often you keep it on? Over time, the Kill A Watt can tell you.

You plug the thing you want to measure into the Kill A Watt. You then plug the Kill A Watt into the wall. You can then come back later and it will tell you a variety of things (total watts used, total elapsed time, and so on).

This new Kill A Watt EZ offers a few more features than my last one but it is $10 more expensive. Personally, I think it is worth the extra money. Although my time is worth less to me than it once was, it is still worth something. Over the life of the unit, I expect it to save me a lot of time.

First, if you unplug it from the wall it still remembers the data. The old one didn't. Second, it allows you to enter your actual electricity rate. It remembers that rate until you want to change it. This allows you to easily see (at the touch of a button), how much the electricity is costing per year, per month, per week, per day, or per hour. Very handy! No more dragging a calculator around.

I recently said that I was curious how much my Playstation 3 would cost me to help out science through folding@home. The jury's in. It will cost me roughly $115 per year in electricity to have my Playstation running 24 hours a day to be part of the distributed computing network. That assumes I'd be running my Playstation solely to do that. I won't be. I play games on it too of course.

I have also determined that my personal computer isn't nearly as cost effective. It draws roughly the same power, but can't do the work nearly as quickly. It's old and lacks the Playstation's faster math abilities. However, if I only allow it to do the work when my computer is turned on anyway, then the additional cost is only $34 per year (according to the Kill A Watt). That assumes my computer is on 24 hours a day, which it is not. In a nutshell, when computers have to think harder then they also use more power. Folding@home makes my computer have to think very hard.

There's more to it though. Most of this extra power consumption goes directly into heat. In the winter, the true cost of helping science is far lower. I have to heat my house anyway. Both the computer and the Playstation become electric heaters.

We keep our pet bird in my office. I normally put an electric heater in that room anyway during the winter to keep the bird warm. Therefore, running my computer to do science work for the benefit of mankind doesn't really cost me anything in the winter. I needed to generate the heat anyway.

If cost is an issue, then don't contribute to science in the summer. Contribute more to science in the winter. It would be a win win for everyone. In any event, my Playstation 3 will be contributing year round. It would be a shame to waste its extremely fast computational abilities, especially since it draws less power than two 60 watt light bulbs.

Folding@home PS3 FAQ

Starting in 2006, we began looking forward to another major advance in capabilities. This advance utilizes the new Cell processor in Sony's PLAYSTATION 3 (PS3) to achieve performance previously only possible on supercomputers. With this new technology (as well as new advances with GPUs), we will likely be able to attain performance on the 20 GigaFLOP scale per computer. With about 50,000 such machines, we would be able to achieve performance on the PetaFLOP scale. With software from Sony, the PlayStation 3 will contribute to the Folding@home project, pushing FAH another major step forward.

With these computational advances, coupled with new simulation methodologies to harness these advances, we will be able to address questions previously considered impossible to tackle computationally, and make even greater impacts on our knowledge of folding and folding related diseases such as Alzheimer's Disease, Huntington's Disease, and certain forms of cancer.