You Have Power Vampires in your House
Here is something I see in almost every house I visit. The phone chargers are left plugged in all the time – makes it very convenient to just connect the phone overnight and disconnect in the morning. The chargers are always on, and always consuming a little bit of electricity. How much? Not much.
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Of the phone chargers I have in my house, all use less than one watt, even when they're charging the phone. If I leave a charger drawing half a watt plugged in all the time, it will use 4380 watt-hours a year. I pay 9.67 cents per kilowatt hour, so that charger would cost me a little over 42 cents for the year. I still unplug the charger when I'm not using it.
But I don't have only one phone charger in my house. Any appliance with a remote control draws a little power even when it's turned off – TV's; audio equipment; cable boxes; air conditioners, ceiling fans; garage door openers – all of these are making the electric meter turn a little more quickly. They all require standby power to the remote receiver. When you punch the power-on button on the remote control the receiver in the appliance needs to be awake so it can turn on the appliance. When you combine all of the standby power in a house, you can have a significant amount of wattage. This is known as “phantom power” and the devices that use it are sometimes called “power vampires” (because they have two “teeth” that stick into the receptacles and they suck power).
Some of these devices don't need to be on all the time, and some do. Things like telephone answering equipment, HVAC thermostats and fax machines don't work if you turn them off entirely. But you can save energy and money if you disconnect the appliances you use occasionally or that draw the most power. The Berkeley Laboratory has a list and a chart of common appliances and how much power they draw. Microwave ovens and laptop chargers are among the most power hungry. If you leave your laptop charger plugged in, it's spinning its wheels with no purpose and you'll pay for the heat it produces. The best use of a laptop charger is to let the computer run on batteries when you can, and plug in the charger just long enough to recharge the batteries.
From the research I've done, the experts generally agree that five to ten percent of US energy use is for standby power. Every little effort we make to unplug or disconnect contributes to lower energy bills and reduced pollutants in the atmosphere.
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Until next month,
Jamey
