I have an AC appliance (small air pump that blows up Halloween yard thing) I plugged into AC50S showing it’s pulling 12 watts. Same thing into the AC200 is 70 watts. Why?
If my math is right, I’ll get 500Wh/12W= 41 hours usage out of the AC50S, and 1700Wh/70W=24 hours out of the AC200. That’s crazy. Am I doing something wrong. I can post pics if needed…I do have a kill-a-watt meter.
There are two ways to measure electricity consumption: real power and apparent power (VA or volt-ampere). My guess is that your AC50S and AC200 are measuring different metrics. You can measure both metrics with your kill-a-watt by switching between the Watts (real power) and apparent power (VA).
Fun fact, power stations (and real world power generation plants) must produce power equivalent to the apparent, NOT real power. So for example if your kill-a-watt measures your air pump as consuming 12 watts of real and 70 VA of apparent power then it will need to generate 70 VA of power which might show as 70 “watts” on your AC200’s display.
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Hi @Lee , How many watts is your small air pump? Can you try to let the 2 machines carry other loads to compare?
It looks to me that they are pulling identical loads with the kil a watt meter but read differently on each individual devices display. I would attribute that to errors in the way they are measuring watts. I have seen this with a lot of bluetti devices, they shouldn’t be that far apart but sometimes they are. Its possible that the kil a watt is the correct one.
@Lee what’s the VA reading on the Kill-A-Watt when your pump is running? You have to press the 3rd grey button from the left to switch between Watts and VA.