So I borrowed this spiffy little device called the Kill-a-Watt from a coworker. As they say:
Connect your appliances into the Kill A Wattâ„¢, and assess how efficient they are. A large LCD display counts consumption by the Kilowatt-hour just like utility companies. You can figure out your electrical expenses by the hour, day, week, month, even an entire year. Monitor the quality of your power by displaying Voltage, Line Frequency, and Power Factor.
In other words, be a geek and plug in all your electronics one at a time and see how much juice they use. Very interesting and has the side benefit of making you clean up all your power cords because you have unplug and rearrange everything anyways to fit the Kill-a-Watt in. The ongoing number collection can be found at here at Google Spreadsheets. FYI, you’ll need a Google account to view it. Sorry about that but the Docs & Spreadsheets are to useful to not use.
I’ve also switched over all my photos to another open source program called