Scary! As was just noted in the video, a typical American family gives up 10% of their electric bill to vampire wattage. But where do I fit into the mold? I use my computer (which has two monitors), cell phone/tablet charger, router, television, printer, and Xbox frequently, and do not unplug them after use. Their combined yearly usage of unneeded energy is sucking precious money that could be spending elsewhere (or saving if I want to pretend to be a grownup). To answer this question I decided to measure my vampire wattage and find out just how much money I have been wasting each year.
My first step was to gather the tools I would need for figuring out how much wattage I am losing to the scummy electricity vampires. It turns out that I just needed one - a watt reader.
I picked one up at Home Depot for about $30. Its main function is to give readouts in kW/hr for the device(s) that are plugged in, but it has a few other functions that indicate the elapsed time, cost in dollars, volts, and the ability to set the rate of charge per kilowatt-hour. Before I began testing I set the rate of charge in order to get an accurate reading of cost. I used the figures Xcel lists on their website for October through May, which is $0.145 per kW/hr. When I calculated my yearly totals at the end they were skewed as rates do change throughout the year, but this at least provided me a general idea of how much I use and how much I can save.
Once I had my rate dialed in I was ready to begin my testing.
These are the electronics that I have in my room, and where they are plugged in:
6 socket power strip:
Computer tower
Sony 19" LCD monitor
Samsung 21.5" LED monitor
Cellphone charger
Netgear router
DVR
Three socket extension cord plugged into a wall outlet:
Tablet charger
Epson Printer
Xbox
32" Samsung TV
To begin I decided to tackle my power strip, which is this snarling beast of a thicket I try to hide behind my computer. In this strip I have my two monitors, computer tower, router, DVR and my cell phone charger.
I let the watt reader sit over night for 12 hours, and I based my yearly calculations off the assumption of 12 hours of down time per 24 hours. This didn't give me a perfectly accurate account of my vampire watt yearly usage because I am obviously sometimes using my electronics more or less depending on the day, and the off time is not always exactly the same. But I would estimate this as a good average for my daily non-use as my electronics are off when I'm sleeping (~8 hrs) and when I'm gone during the day for at least 4 hours.
Results:
Over a 12 hour period, the turned-off electronics plugged into my power strip used 0.66 kW/hrs, which is only about 9 cents for the period. Not a lot! But over the course of a year that little bit adds up to about $33 of my money, not to mention the wasted energy that is unnecessary being drained from the grid.
My second task was to tackle the four horsemen of the apocalypse, or rather, my TV, printer, old school Xbox, and tablet charger.
Again I left them "off" and plugged-in to the watt reader for a 12 hour period at a rate of $0.145 per kW/hr. The results were a bit surprising. Only 0.08 kW/hrs were recorded at a whopping cost of 1 cent for the 12 hours of time - about $4 for the entire year. I was sure my television and printer were bigger vampires than that, but I was apparently wrong.
Upon further research I found that most of my appliances use very few watts when off, with the exception of my DVR (plugged into my power strip), which uses a considerable amount of power when "off." This would explain the much higher rate of kW/hrs in my power strip test (along with more appliances being plugged into it) compared with my TV test group. DVRs have much higher rates of power use when turned off according to an article written by William Pentland, a contributor for Forbes. In the article he posted a handy chart that lists some of the more power hungry vampire appliances that are commonly used.
It's also worth mentioning that DVRs, or set-top boxes, that are installed by service providers seem to be a huge energy hog in general. According to a report by the National Resource Defense Council (NRDC), nearly two-thirds of annual energy usage for DVRs occurs when viewers are not watching or recording content, which accounts for nearly $2 billion a year in wasted energy.
It seems that to cut a majority of my vampire wattage, all I need to do is tackle my biggest waster - the DVR.
I decided to do one final test with my DVR alone plugged into the watt reader. The end result seemed to matched the research. The total for a 12 hour period was 0.51 kW/hrs. This means that my DVR is almost 70% of my total vampire watt waste.
Luckily I can solve this problem waste with a simple click on my power strip. Or better yet, I could buy a smart power strip like the ones mentioned in the iGo video that automatically kills power to peripherals that are using needless energy.
Conclusion:
Although most of my electronics use a negligible amount of energy while powered off (with the exception of my DVR), and the money I save on a yearly basis is not going to buy me a new car, there are other consequences for not stopping the wasted energy being drained. When the problem is looked at nationally, the little bits of energy being wasted add up to huge amounts of energy that are needlessly being thrown away. Thankfully there are recent regulations that have limited stand by power-use on new appliances to 1 watt in 2010 and 0.5 watts by 2013. Unfortunately if you are like me, you still have electronics that date back before 2010 and do not have that requirement. But companies like Belkin are making products that automatically cut power to devices that are not currently on. In the future, it will be interesting to watch how the industry evolves and adapts itself to appliances that preform on a high level and use less energy.
