Measure. Analyze. Learn.
This is the Watts Up Pro.
It's very useful for being able to
monitor your energy consumption.
You might use it to monitor the power consumption of a
television, maybe compare LCD versus LED television.
You might use it to study phantom loads.
You've got power bricks plugged in,
and you want to be able to measure that.
So, monitoring the energy consumption of an
air conditioner, or a refrigerator, or something like that.
And so, the way it operates is that you end up plugging this
in to your power outlet, into your plug.
And then, it has its own outlet here.
And, what it's doing is it's measuring the power from this,
so its running through the device there.
It plugs into the computer or to a LabQuest via USB.
And, it comes with its own special USB cable here.
So, its got mini-USB on one end
and standard USB on the other.
And, it plugs into the port here on the side.
So, you plug that one in there.
And then, when you're ready to use it with the device,
it plugs in via USB. So, on a LabQuest 2,
we're actually going to plug it into the USB port.
So now, I'm going to use the Watts Up to
actually compare some light bulbs.
I have three different light bulbs: and incandescent bulb,
a compact florescent, and an LED light bulb.
And I can compare the power consumption by those.
So, what I will do, is take them and screw them into the socket,
and we'll have the power strip plugged into the Watts Up Pro,
to be able to measure that.
So, the first thing I need to do is to plug it into the Watts Up Pro.
And, what I'll do is, we're looking here at just the meter,
and right now it's saying 0 watts.
And, I'm just going to screw in the incandescent bulb.
And, we can see what happens on the meter, when I do this.
And so, the power consumption jumps up there to,
I've got about 50W there.
Unscrew that.
And so, that just lets me see that it is working right now.
And, if we take a look at this part of the screen.
If we look at our default collection parameters.
It's time based, 1 sample per second, for 600 seconds.
It's a 10 minute collection.
So, it's set for, maybe you to measure the power consumption
as you turn on some different devices, and monitor it over time.
It would be very easy to set it up and let it run, for say, 24 hours,
if you wanted to. So, you could let it go for a lot longer time.
I'm going to shorten this time up to 1 minute.
It's easy to do. I just tap where it says "Duration".
And, I just need to shorten that up to 60 seconds.
And so, I'll just tap there where it says 600.
I'll do 60. Hitting "Done", here we go, hitting "OK".
So, we've changed our duration to 60 seconds.
Now we're ready to collect some data.
So, I'm going to press the collect button.
And, it's going to start collection there.
And so, right now it's reading zero.
And then, I will screw in the incandescent light bulb.
And, we see the power consumption increase there.
Let it run along there for a few seconds.
Then, I will unscrew that bulb.
Switch to the compact florescent.
And, we see the power consumption go up for it.
Let it run a few more seconds.
And lastly, I will try the LED light bulb.
And, we see the power consumption for that one.
So now, we have some data, and we might want to analyze this.
And, look at the power consumption of the different bulbs.
And, our graph auto scaled.
It made it as large as possible given the data we've collected.
So, we've got some data here, let's do a little analysis.
And, it has auto scaled our graph.
And the first one is the incandescent.
There's our compact florescent, and our LED.
So, I might just want to examine values at the top of each peak,
just to get some reading of that.
And so, if I tap up there, I end up with a little over
52 watts there on the meter.
If I tap here, I get 21 watts there.
And, if I tap at some point over there,
I'm ending up with like 7 1/2 watts.
And so, we see that the LED uses a lot less energy than
the incandescent light bulb.
So again, the Watts Up Pro is used to measure
the power consumption of electrical items in the home.
There are other version of this for other countries.
And so, we're using the 120, they may be using the 220 voltage.
So, there are different versions there, and different frequencies.
It's very useful to be able to monitor your energy consumption.
So, if you're doing investigations involving that,
the Watts Up Pro is definitely a good device to use.