Happy Halloween, everyone! No, I don’t have a picture of all of us in wigs (and it’s not because I didn’t think of it, or don’t have enough wigs), sorry. But I did run into such a timely article today, I can’t help linking to it.
Apparently things like leaving charged phones and PDAs plugged into their chargers, as well as PCs and TVs in sleep or standby mode, and all those other things quietly running when not being used, take a lot of electricity. It’s now being called vampire electricity, and there’s an interesting and timely story here. My favorite quote is:
In California, lawmakers passed a proposal last year – dubbed the Vampire Slayers Act – to add vampire electronics labels to consumer products, detailing how much energy a charger, computer, DVD player, PlayStation, microwave or coffee maker uses when on, off or in standby mode.
Vampires are going to keep living in my house. Too hard to shut down everything. I think that this problem is over estimated. At least where my toys are concerned.
All the more incentive to get my Kill-A-Watt meter busy in our house, figuring out exactly how large our vampires are… Neat little thing will measure electricity usage for each device you plug in to it.
This problem was discussed a few weeks ago here: http://www.d8a.co.uk/news/23-save-money-and-help-the-energy-crisis and it was suggested that timer switches could be used to turn items off at night.
I wonder how much power those timer switches – the cheap kind we would all buy to make sure that it didn’t cost us hundreds of dollars to shut everything down – actually leach.
Maybe every house plug should include a little on/off switch?