Are there vampires in your home? Do they vant to suck your...energy? To the tune of 5 cents of every dollar you spend on energy for your home, energy vampires are sucking on your energy and your money, which equals $4 billion dollars each year in the US. The US energy department is estimating that it could rise to 20% of total energy costs by the year 2010.
What's an energy vampire? It's all the electronics that are really on stand-by when you turn them off--even your chargers that don't have anything attached to them, they're still sucking electricity.
posted originally from: AT:Hometech
Can't someone just start a trend to put switches on the transformers? Then we can leave stuff plugged in but turn it off on the transformer itself. Sounds good right? Its not all the time that you want to turn off a whole power strip.
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I went around my house and measured everything with a Kill-a-Watt and found that even the simplest things really wasted a lot of energy. My TV used as much power to sit on standby for a day as it did when I actually turned it on for an hour. I started out unplugging everything, but I trailed off after a while. Now, I use a couple of those old plug-in timers around the house. I have them set so that everything in the house that uses electricity is only on standby when I'm actually at home. They use relatively little electricity, and they save me from having to go around the house switching things off. I can override them when I want to and I'm pretty sure they've paid for themselves by now.
When I think about it though, I wish people would stop worrying about wall warts and concentrate on getting people to shut off the things we used to shut off, like desktop computers and monitors. Unless you have something exotic going on, shut your computer off when you're not using it! We don't even think of that as as bad habit, but it's really wasteful. I used to leave music playing all day -- I'd just press the mute key on the way out the door. My computer never went to sleep, since it thought it was "working" all day. "Screen savers" are also incredibly wasteful.
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