Vampire Electricity--Part 2

I've been wondering about vampire electricity (electricity that is drawn by something when it's not in use), so I borrowed a Kill-a-Watt device to see for myself how much electricity is actually being used by various items around my house. In August I gave the device a try and reported on five random things. Since then, I have measured our DVR player usage which is supposed to one of the worst offenders. I have read that it uses more electricity than a refrigerator. So I also measured our refrigerator. Our DVR is part of the set top box for our cable TV service. Our fridge size is 14.4 cubic feet, was built in 2004 and doesn't have an ice maker--which means that it's not very big and fairly energy efficient. I've added the results for these two items to the ones I measured before. They are highlighted in blue on the chart below.

Item	KWH/24 hours	Cost/month	Cost/year
Toaster with display	0.02	$0.07	$0.87
Outlet only	0.03	$0.11	$1.30
Lamp-off, plugged in	0.03	$0.11	$1.30
Coffee pot with display	0.04	$0.14	$1.79
Computer Monitor	0.36	$1.30	$15.55
Laptop-large	0.47	$1.70	$20.30
DVR	0.78	$2.80	$34.16
Refrigerator	1.45	$5.22	$63.51

 (As with last time, I used $0.12/KWH to figure costs.)

As you can see, the DVR player costs $2.80/month and the refrigerator costs $5.22/month to run. At least in my case, the DVR usage does not come close to the refrigerator usage as I had read. Both numbers are fairly low in the big scheme of things but large enough to see if we want to do anything differently with how we operate them. Upon first examination, we are pretty good with our refrigerator usage. We don't open the door much and rarely stand with it open for long. Also, we keep the freezer pretty full, so it can run more efficiently.

As far as the DVR goes, this is purely a luxury item, but it does provide a fair amount of entertainment for us. We record most of the shows that we watch so that we can view them essentially commercial free. This saves us both time and aggravation. However, we rarely record or watch anything during the night, so I think we'll try turning it off during that time.

Now, what to measure next? Maybe it will be our desk top CPU's. We'll see.

Vampire Electricity

There is a lot of discussion these days about vampire electricity--electricity that is used by an appliance or electronic device when it's not in use but plugged in. These can be things like the digital display on your coffee pot or your phone charger. Most of these discussions can be quite alarming when you see the statistics they list of how much electricity these objects use both in terms of your budget and the carbon footprint. However, the articles usually give one grand number without going into the specifics of individual devices. So recently when I discovered that Miss Landers had a Kill-a-Watt gadget that measures electricity usage of things that plug in, I had to try it. I used it with a few things around the house to get a feel of how much electricity they were actually using. I measured each object for 24 hours and here are the results.

Item	KWH/24 hours	Cost/month	Cost/year
Toaster with display	0.02	$0.07	$0.87
Outlet only	0.03	$0.11	$1.30
Lamp-off, plugged in	0.03	$0.11	$1.30
Coffee pot with display	0.04	$0.14	$1.79
Computer Monitor	0.36	$1.30	$15.55
Laptop-large	0.47	$1.70	$20.30

As you can see, the lamp (turned off), the toaster with a digital display, and the Kill-a-Watt device itself all consumed negligible amounts of electricity--0.02-0.03 KWH/24 hours. I'm assuming that that may be in the margin of error of measurement, but I don't know for sure. The coffee pot display only consumed a little more with 0.04 KWH/24 hours. (None of the above items were in use during the measurement. They were just plugged in.) However, the monitor and laptop did use noticeable amounts of electricity although a lot less than I thought they would. I didn't measure only when they were turned off, but all of their use during a 24 hour period. The monitor is in use quite a bit, but does go into a power saving mode at night. The laptop is from Ward's work and is quite large and old. I'm sure that many newer ones and certainly tablets use less electricity than this one. However, that's what we had. Even with their heavier usage, the monitor and laptop consumed less that 1 KWH in a 24 hour period.

I then translated this usage into what it meant financially and that was a lot harder than I thought it would be. I assumed that I would just be able to read the charge for a KWH off of my electric bill, but it's not so simple. Besides that number, you also have to add in the additional costs that you pay every month. I ended up with $0.12/KWH as a reasonable estimate (only about half of that number is actual electric use). Rates vary across the country, so you may be paying more or less for your electricity. What I saw was that even if I leave all of these objects plugged in for a year, they're not going to break the bank.

I had a lot more measurements planned, but Theo took the device back with him one weekend. He wanted to measure various things in his apartment trying to see if he can cut his budget any more--mostly if there is a more efficient way to cool things. When I get it back, next up will be the TV. It's an Energy Star one and is supposed to only cost $6.00/year to operate (plugged in all of the time, 5 hours/day on.) I'm interested in that one in particular because it is supposed to be one of the bad offenders of drawing phantom power but the $6/year doesn't suggest that. We'll see.

Until next time...

More general reading and tips on cutting back on your electricity use:

http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/everyday-tech/vampire-power3.htm

http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/komando/2012/10/26/komando-electric-bills/1649195/

https://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=about.vampires