Is it time to hunt vampires in your home?

Many people have have become more energy conscience. They have replaced drafty doors and windows, caulked everything in sight, put in extra insulation, replaced regular light bulbs with new CFL’s and maybe updated major appliances to EnergyStar rated ones. Maybe it’s also time to go vampire hunting through the house.

Walk through your home at night with the lights off and you may be surprised by the amount of light put off by “standby” lights or blinking lights and digital displays on various appliances and electronic devices. Because these devices are ready to operate or receive signals at all times, they act like vampires silently sucking away energy even when they are turned “off.” Each blink as you walk through the room is a little voice mocking you and singing out “Hey, look at me; I'm sucking the money right out of your wallet..”

A 2007 article in Greetips advised that wasted energy, known as standby or phantom energy loss, represents a relatively small but growing percentage of an individual home’s electricity use (about five percent), but taken across all U.S. households, adds up to an estimated 65 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity each year. This extra electricity costs consumers more than $5.8 billion annually and sends more than 87 billion pounds of heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. That was 4 years ago and devices that operate in a standby mode have proliferated.

Some of the biggest energy wasters in most homes are the adapters that come with rechargeable battery-powered cordless phones, cell phones, digital cameras and music players, power tools, computer peripherals and other electronic devices. Most draw power whenever they’re plugged into an outlet, regardless of whether the device battery is fully charged—or even connected. Other culprits include appliances or electronic equipment with standby capability (such as televisions and computer monitors), a remote control, and/or a digital clock display (such as microwaves, DVD players, and stereo systems).

You can tell you’re wasting energy, even if there’ no light on the device because most of those little charging or power bricks will be warm or hot to the touch. Computer peripherals also consume a lot of standby energy, keeping printers ready to print, speakers ready to speak and disk drives spinning endlessly.

So what should you do if (or I should say when) you find that your home is indeed infested with power vampires? Turn them off! Most of these little power suckers are doing nothing worthwhile most of the time. It may be a small inconvenience to have to go back to them and turn them back on, rather than sitting across the room with a remote in hand a clicking a button, but it can save you money over time. For those devices that are close together, plug them all into a power strip that can be switched off. For the charging bricks, don’t just unplug the device that was charging – that leaves the brick plugged in and those charging bricks never stop providing a charge, even when the device that they are there to charge is unplugged; they just divert that charge to a resister and make heat out of it. Unplug the brick or put a bunch of them on a switched power strip, too, and turn it off when nothings plugged in to charge.

Not all instant on devices that have standby power running to them all the time can be unplugged without suffering the consequences of having to reprogram them; however, a great number of devices that we use only occasionally – a DVD player or video game, for instance- might as well be unplugged between uses. After all, there is no purposed served by leaving them plugged in and there certainly is a cost involved.

Now you may be saying, but Norm, come-on these aren’t really big bad vampires sucking massive amounts of energy. I an agree with that, they are more like bedbugs, scurrying around while you sleep each with a tiny bite that if left uncheck can make you miserable. So maybe I should have entitled this blog post – Don’t; Let the Bedbugs Bite.