Modifications to Kill A Watt

 I seem to remember sometime in the past in this newsgroup someone
posted a link to an article on how to modify the Kill A Watt meter so
that in case of total loss of power, it would retain the previous
readings, and when power was restored, it would resume the
counts.  I think it required placing a battery backup in the circuit.
WOuld anyone have a link or info on this mod?

Is there any other manufacturer that makes a similar product
that will not lose it's data on power interruption?

Our utility is pretty reliable, but we sometimes have one or
two second dropouts and I lost a whole months reading
on my Kill A Watt.

Thanks for any leads.

Jim

 
Some ads for them mentioned a P3 with battery backup. The price was
quite a bit higher than Harbor Freight's $29.99

 

There are some versions of the KAW which incorporate
a memeroy circuit.

One nifty unit is built like a power strip with an
illuminated display, eight outlets, and the aformentioned
memory. Oh, it also includes a "peak demand" toggle
so you can see that your 125 watt kitchen refrig
pulled 400 watts when defrosting...

check out "model p4320"

Note that this one was about $100 compared to
the basic version that sells for (roughly) $25.


--
_____________________________________________________
Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key
             dannyb@panix.com
[to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded]

 Hello Danny;

I went to the KAW site and looked up the 4320, downloaded the brochure
but saw no mention of backup memory.  Could you please advise where
you saw that information?  Maybe if I download the instruction manual
they would have information on power failures.

I did a Google search on modifying the KAW and could not find the
article on adding a backup battery.  I went back a few years in this
newsgroup, but could not find it either.  Maybe it was in Mother Earth
News or Homepower magazines that I saw it.  If I remember there was
very little to adding the backup battery, just the battery and a diode
or some such.  

On the power strip I found a price of $89.00.  If you can find that
info on the memory please advise.  More than once I had lost long
readings, but should have written down the figures every 24 hours, but
I never can seem to remember to do it every day at the same time..

Jim






On Wed, 13 Aug 2008 16:16:35 +0000 (UTC), danny burstein

 

Now this is weird. I could swear... that I had
both seen a reference to the memory in the instruction
sheets and had also tested it myself. (Not specifically
intending, but I had moved it from outlet to outlet
and am pretty sure I still saw the old readings).

But now when I unplugged it for an hour it didn't have
the wattage numbers, but did have the clock (that is,
elapsed) time.

Unfortunately I no longer have the instruction sheet [a].

I'll try some tests later with just short term
unplugging. It might, might... be that there's memory
storage for a couple of minutes.

[a] my initial unit was intermittently DOA and I had to
return it to the distributer. I included the original
packaging (and, grumble, paid for the postage).

They shipped back a replacement unit without the
info sheets.
 


--
_____________________________________________________
Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key
             dannyb@panix.com
[to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded]