https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_(United_States_coin)

In late 2025, the Mint halted the production of pennies for circulation, largely due to cost.[8][9]

They’re antiques now! Can’t expend them on such mundane uses!

Apparently the original Easy-Bake Oven was 200W, then dropped to 100W, then moved to some sort of dedicated heating element.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easy-Bake_Oven

The original Kenner Easy-Bake Oven was heated by two 100-watt incandescent light bulbs, one above the food tray and one below.

The idea was that the cake would bake more quickly and evenly if heated from both sides. Later models used only one bulb, leveraging convection from better interior heating dynamics to achieve the same results.

In 2011, the last version to use a 100-watt incandescent light bulb was replaced by a new version with a dedicated heating element, named the Easy-Bake Ultimate Oven. The replacement was due to the availability of alternatives to the incandescent light bulbs that heated previous versions of the Easy-Bake Oven.[23] It was feared that newer lamp requirements would render all models that used light bulbs as their heating elements obsolete because lamps would no longer be available. (The company never provided initial or replacement bulbs.)[24][25]

investigates

Looks like the heating-element-based variant is still 100W:

https://consumercare.hasbro.com/api/download/E6120_en-us

ELECTRICAL REQUIREMENTS:120 Volts AC only – 60 Hz. 100 Watts

If it was a kitchen outlet, it may have been a 20A (2400 watt) circui

Nah, this was a 15 amp circuit, though that’s a fair point.

Did it show you the combined wattage

It showed something like 2400W, IIRC, but the meter itself is only rated to something like 1900 W (well, VA), so it may not have been a perfectly-accurate reading.

goes back to try each independently, and both together

With both on, and the other load, it shows about 2300W in total load for the circuit.

There’s about 200W of other load on the circuit.

The heater alone — listed as being 800W, if I remember aright – bumps it up by 700W alone.

The kettle bumps it up by 1300W alone. So it might have been ~100W off at that point, but it was correct that it was over what the circuit could do.

I dunno how much power those things draw,

https://homegrail.com/how-many-watts-does-a-cpap-use/

Most CPAP machines range from 30–60 watts, with some using up to 150 watts. If you are using rechargeable batteries to charge your machine, you need to be aware of the power required to run it so your CPAP machine won’t shut down in the middle of the night.

UPC designed for a desktop computer

I wasn’t really aware of this until a few years ago, but UPSes aren’t really generally designed to keep computers running through power outages. Even today, most still have lead-acid batteries (which have limited energy density and don’t deal well with being deeply discharged many times).

They were really designed to solve two problems:

• In a power outage, being able to shut a computer down cleanly. That means time to save documents and — back in the 1980s and 1990s — shut down cleanly, to avoid filesystem corruption, when commonly-used filesystems could become corrupt through not shutting down cleanly. They also often came with functionality to automatically shut down the computer cleanly when the UPS’s battery was getting low, if a human had not yet done so.

• If a generator that automatically comes online in an outage is present, keeping the computer running until the generate giving it time to come online.

This means that UPSes tend to have a pretty decent inverter, can put out a lot of power…but generally can’t store a whole lot of power. They also are guaranteed to come online quickly; I believe that it’s typically in under 20 ms, a blip that a computer power supply can handle.

To grab a random UPS:

https://www.amazon.com/APC-SmartConnect-Interactive-Uninterruptible-SMC1500C/dp/B077Y62GSJ

That runs $529. It has a 900W inverter.

It uses this battery, which is lead-acid 11Ah 12Vdc (so 132 Wh).

To grab a random power station of about the same price:

https://www.amazon.com/BLUETTI-Portable-Station-Generator-Off-grid/dp/B095Y6ZTR1

That’s $500, has an 800W inverter, but has 716Wh of battery storage, about 5.4 times what the UPS does. It also has an LiFePo4 battery, which will last a lot longer in terms of cycles and dealing with deep discharge than a lead-acid battery.

I woke up because my CPAP stopped.

I understand that some people with CPAPs get lithium power station things specifically so that they don’t stop in an outage.

I gotta say that it’s really satisfying for that squeak or resistance to be gone. Running around the house with some oil or similar is pretty satisfying.