It's
time for bed and as you make your rounds through the house - locking doors and
windows, filling your water glass, shutting off lights - you observe hints of
electronic life. The hum of the refrigerator's compressor, the whine of the
computer's hard disks, and the glow of LCD clock displays on a myriad of
appliances all will be drawing power, however minute, throughout the night. Even after hitting the "off" switch, a host of consumer electronics require constant power simply to keep time, backup memory, or (in the case of your DVR) record that late night episode of The Daily Show. This standby power, or colloquially "vampire draw", accounts for a huge portion of a typical household's energy waste; in this case, blogger Mike D calculates that the total vampire draw in his home is about 110 watts, enough to power four 25 watt cfl bulbs.
Unfortunately,
manufacturers of our favorite electronic products rarely take this constant
consumption into consideration, and many devices require round the clock power
to function correctly. The ubiquitous LCD clocks which plaster the dashboards
of stoves and stereos cannot keep time without drawing power, however small,
when the gadget is not in use. Your child's gaming systems are in contact with
the central servers overnight, downloading updates and new content.
Additionally, any remotely controlled devices require a steady supply of energy
in order to receive the "power on" signal from your remote. Suffice to say,
there's more going on in your home overnight than you may think.
Addressing vampire draw becomes a question of opportunity cost. It is important to analyze the devices in your home which are drawing energy when not in use.
A company named P3 International has designed a line of monitoring products, Kill A Watt, which provides an instantaneous readout of the electricity use for any device plugged into its interface. The simple gadget sits between your cord and the wall, displaying and recording the electricity usage for your review. By analyzing your home's appliances and devices, you can determine which are the largest wasters and determine whether you can live without their offline services. Because many consumer products are designed to draw electricity all the time to power the internal clocks, LED displays, and backup systems, the concerned homeowner must sacrifice some of these conveniences to reduce the waste. Our inclination to hide cords behind cumbersome furniture pieces makes unplugging the home entertainment system every night and plugging it back in the next morning a potentially arduous.
Thankfully, the use of consolidated power strips, or surge protectors, makes this a much easier task. Simply switching those off breaks the connection and stops any downstream devices from drawing needless power. P3's Kill A Watt Power Strip not only provides this utility, but also allows you to see the total usage. One of the greatest features of this product line is the ability to input your local electricity rates - allowing you to see just how much that big-screen plasma television is costing you in energy.
At the very least, understanding where the electricity a homeowner pays for is being used allows for greater control of which devices can be unplugged to save power and carbon emissions.
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Wow this takes me back. Do you have a RSS feed?