Comment Killawatt meter (Score 3, Interesting) 219
I got a killawatt meter a few years ago and used to aggregate all the power to run through it. (This was at home where you could do such a thing on a single circuit). I realized I was burning something like 8 to 15 bucks a month per PC (new hampshire power at around 14 cents per kwh I think we are set to). Being a college kid back then with 40 bucks of cash burning just to "seem geeky" ended up being an eye opener (the killawatt paid for itself basically the first 10 days I owned it).
Fortunately we have all moved to VMs and these days I still run the same misconfigured lamp stack, but now on a vm on a mac mini that the whole house uses for playing and listening to music, videos, movies, surfing, email - the everything-computer. With virtualbox running hidden in the background with another little universe crammed into it. (Running a nat router in a vm seems cool to me more than it really is. Rather, putting a wan address on a vm seems cool.)