Some­times thing just work out.  That was my expe­ri­ence with the Kill A Watt project.  A Kill A Watt is an energy mon­i­tor­ing device.  Basi­cally, you plug it into an out­let, then plug an elec­tric device or appli­ance into it and it will tell you how much energy is being used.  It has dif­fer­ent set­tings and you can see the energy in watts and lots of other set­tings and you can set it to mon­i­tor the energy, or the energy over a period of time.

These were brought to my atten­tion by Christo­pher Rus­sell, Howard County’s Energy Man­ager.  He sits next to me at work, so that was pretty easy.  He had seen that libraries in other parts of the coun­try were lend­ing these so he con­tacted Ann Gilli­gan, Chief Oper­at­ing Offi­cer of the Library.  She was inter­ested in the idea and has been essen­tial in mak­ing this project happen.

Cathy Hud­son, a mem­ber of the Howard County Envi­ron­men­tal Sus­tain­abil­ity Board, had a Kill A Watt and let us use it so that we could show peo­ple the unit.   That reminds me that I still have to get that back to her.  Note to self.

Then I had a lucky break that I was work­ing with Sue Muller, all around great nat­u­ral­ist and works for Howard County’s Nat­ural Resources divi­sion.  She is an active mem­ber of the Sierra Club and told me on a sep­a­rate topic that the local Club had some money and was look­ing for a project to help.  With some help from our HOLLIE vol­un­teer Mil­ton Fadely we deter­mined the best choice for this type of device.  Thank you Milton.

The Sierra Club, Howard County Group decided to donate 12 Kill A Watt EZ units to the Library, 2 for each branch.  Thank you to Ken Clark and Nina Yu Pres­i­dent and Trea­surer, respec­tively, of the local Sierra Club.

So a bit of emails, meet­ings and paper­work later, there are 12 Kill A Watt EZs avail­able for loan at our award-winning library.  As of today (7−15−11), they are all checked out and there is a 48 per­son wait­ing list.  Here is the link to the Kill A Watt EZ library cat­a­log page.  If you go to hclibrary.org and type Kill A Watt into the search box you will find it.

We hope that peo­ple will use the Kill A Watts and let us know their suc­cess sto­ries.  Our office has used it in class­room demon­stra­tions and my daugh­ter and her friend used one for the sci­ence fair.  For these projects it’s inter­est­ing to com­pare the watts on dif­fer­ent items such as the same lamp with a tra­di­tional bulb vs. a CFL.  You can take it one step fur­ther by esti­mat­ing the hours used and mul­ti­ply that by the kilo­watt hour cost found on your elec­tric bill.  For the sci­ence fair, the girls esti­mated that one CFL bulb used 5 hours each day saved about $11 each year.  Not bad!  If you have a story to tell about using one of the Kill A Watts, please respond to this blog or email me at ereineck@howardcountymd.gov.