The Belkin Conserve Insight is a very nice piece of hardware and has a number of advantages over the Kill-A-Watt. Firstly, there are three outputs.
1) lbs/CO2 per year (or month)
2) $/year (or month)
3) Watts
Both the CO2 and $ setting can be adjusted to account for the cost and CO2 intensity for your local utility.
Averaging. One very nice feature is that after 45 minutes, the Conserve Insight goes in to averaging mode and displays the projected CO2 and $ per year. This is excellent for appliances that are turned on and off like a laptop or a refrigerator. The Watt display, however does not average. It shows the realtime updates.
Location, Location, Location: The small display for the Conserve Insight is located on the end of a 5 foot long cord. This is much better than the Kill-A-Watt that requires you to crawl on your hands and knees to get a reading. Also, the Conserve Insight is very nicely styled and looks great on a desktop. The Kill-A-Watt is much more utilitarian.
Simple: The Conserve Insight is very simple and easy to use. Personally, I do not have any problem with the Kill-A-Watts ease of use, but I have had trouble explaining it to other people.
Range: The Insight Conserve goes down to a much lower range than the Kill-A-Watt. Whereas the Kill-A-Watt bottoms out at 1 Watt, the Conserve Insight goes down to 0.5 Watts. This is a great help when trying to understand the power usage of wall hanging bricks (AC/DC converters). I am always frustrated with the Kill-A-Watt reading either 0,1, or 2. With the Conserve Insight, I can see the difference between 1.0 and 1.2. Nice.
Limits.
There are a couple of things I do not like.
Jumping Display: The watt reading updates a little to frequently. When reading the power to my laptop it jumps quickly from 30 watts to 40 watts and back again. This makes it impossible to get a sense of average power consumption.
KWH?: There is no KWH measurement. However, this can be back calculated from the $ reading and the $/KWH setting you applied to it.
Overall:
Highly recommend this product. Belkin Conserve Insight F7C005q Energy-Use Monitor
I used to own a Kill-A-Watt, buy spilled water on it so I looked after a replacement.
I got this after reading good reviews. I was warned about the lack of functionality, but thought to myself 'surely, it can't be that bad'. It turns out it IS that bad.
Here's what I did:
After setting up the price per kWh, I plugged my small washing machine in it and ran a load. I could see the real time wattage as it was running through its different stages, and that was great. At the end, it showed me the dollar / year and dollar /month amounts. However, that is meaningless to me. I would like to know how many watts or dollars the machine used during the cycle, and it will NOT show you that. I'd like to know whether it cost me 10 cents or 30 cents to run a load. Same thing with my TV. I'd like to know the price of watching TV for one hour.
Kill-a-Watt was bulkier but offered exact and valuable numbers, not CO2 crap.
I was waiting for this product to be available for long time since I wanted to measure my computer system power consumption.
This product is uniquely convenient because you can put the display at eye level, i has a 5-foot tethered cable, not like the similar priced [[ASIN: B000RGF29Q Kill-a-Watt EZ]] and others which have the display right in the device plugged into the socket, this makes reading or monitoring very hard for most of us who has the wall socket low and usually hard to reach where all the cables are. This was a Deal Breaker for me.
The price is relatively OK to Expensive, Base on the quality and features, I think $20 should be the sweet spot price and would make the majority buy it.
The manufacturer did not say the % accuracy, but based on its reading with nothing plugged in, it reads 0-0.5W, I would guess it has <0.5% accuracy, someone correct me if i'm wrong.
Features: It has 3 Buttons.
Button 1: Planet image, reads your CO2 Footprint, forecasts at current usage for 30 Days or 365 Days
Button 2: Dollar Image, reads your $ impact in your electricity bill, forecasts at current usage for 30 days or 365 days.
Button 3: Ray Image, monitors the Watts per hour being consumed at the power socket.
(After 45mins of being plugged in, it will switch to a average mode, which tracks the usage even when computer or else is off, giving you more accurate forecasts)
Features it does NOT come with:
Real time cumulative Watts/$/Co2 consumption. so you have to do your math if you are just testing watt usage over time.
Back-lighted display. Forget using this is very dark room
Will update this review after longer period of use.
I would definitely recommend this product to my friends. - Energy Conservation - Watt Meter - Energy Savings - Power Meter'
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