A while ago I went around the house with a Kill-a-Watt electricity meter, trying to figure out what was using up the most power. It's a nice gadget - you just plug it into the wall, and then plug your appliance into it. You can get instantaneous wattage and also average power over time. (One disadvantage is that it's a pain to plug it into tight spots - it helps to use an extension cord to connect it to the wall. Also it's not as nice as the "clamp" type amp meters you can just place around an already-plugged in cord, but it's cheaper.

Anyway, we use around 30 kWh a day. That's kind of high and it's not clear to me where the power hogs are. Here are a few measurements I took.

Dell Dimension E510	All on	180 W
	Monitor off	140 W
	Standby mode	17 W
Mac PowerPC Mini	All on	100 W
	Monitor off	50 W
Older Gateway PC	All on	150 W
	Monitor off	80 W
Older linux box	CPU only	150 W
Low-voltage lighting	Backyard	56 W
	Front stairs	11 W
Microwave oven	Full power	150
Kenmore fridge	1-day avg	50 W
TV, etc	All off	38 W
	TV	100 W
	TiVo	40 W
	VCR	40 W
	CD + stereo	30 W

The things I haven't measured yet are the lights and the hot tub (heat is gas, so it's only the pump and the ionizer). Still, I don't see how it's going to add up to what we're actually using. Needs more research.

BTW, blogger.com needs to improve the way it deals with table formatting. The html for that table has to be all on 1 line, otherwise lots of BR's get inserted and mess things up.