What you can do about "vampire appliances"

It's Friday night, which may mean that you're headed out for dinner, to hit the bars with from friends, or otherwise celebrate the beginning of the weekend. While you're out, though, some of your appliances are still going to be drawing power even when you think you've turned them off. The fact that many of us own "vampire appliances" like TVs, microwaves, and air conditions is well known, but what can you do about it? Wait around for appliance companies to make their products better at saving energy?

I don't know about you, but even if appliance companies started making energy-saving products I wouldn't be able to afford to purchase them. What I do instead is quite simple, and believe me it will definitely take the edge off your power bill. There are probably several areas of your house where you have several appliances close together that all plug into the same outlet (or nearby ones).

Using my apartment as an example, there's the television, dvd player, and xbox in the living room; microwave and toaster oven in the kitchen; desktop computer in the bedroom, and fish tank, phone charger, battery charger as well. Being that I would need multiple outlets in each location anyway, I bought a few power strips that you can turn on/off, and when I'm not using the appliances I switch the power strips off. This keeps your appliances from sucking power from the outlet, saving your energy and reducing your ecological footprint. It takes a little time to remember to hit all the power strip switches, but it's an easy way to cut your power consumption without having to buy an expensive new appliance.

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I bought a really neat little gadget, called a kill-a-watt, which lets you measure power consumption of 110volt appliances. This is really useful for finding out what some of these vampires are actually doing. I had been worried about flat panel computer monitors, but these were only 40-50watts, and only a watt or two in sleep mode. The cell phone charger was essentially zero once the phone was charged. Even the computer printer, which can be left on for long periods of disuse was only about a watt in sleep mode. My son did discover that his WII standby mode was wasting 8watts, and the only slightly less convenient off mode is now used. Most surprising I learned about the three speed window fans. It seems that for these cheap models, power consumption on the lower (of three) speeds is only a few percent less. Now rather than using say three fans each at low speed, I know that one fan at full speed will do the same work for maybe 40% of the power.

In any case, I highly recommend the device. By lending it around, I image one device per dozen families should be sufficient.