Kill A Watt Teardown

killawatt

Come on, folks. If we keep tearing apart everything that’s handed to us, we’ll never get nice things. SparkFun got their mitts on two Kill A Watts and proceeded to plug them into everything and then dismantled them to see how they work. The Kill A Watt keeps track of how much power is used over time. The largest load they found was their soda machine using 500W (should probably add a motion sensor to that). They plugged a meter on either side of a UPS and found out that it uses 5W just to charge. On the inside of the meter, there isn’t anything too substantial. One unlabeled IC runs the whole show.