Electrical outlets

[AWvsCBsteeeerike3]

I know this probably isn't an option, but at my parents house, I'd always have to move my bedroom from upstairs during the winter to downstairs during the summer. It was very convenient as they had a walk out basement which allowed me to have secret guests during the summer time when school was out.

[mikechamp]

SECRETS!

Thanks for the flashback to that era of the board, AW.

[Arthur Dent]

Products that utilize remotes can use as much as 80% of their operational energy, even when they are off. I've seen research that shows vampire loads can be responsible for as much as 10% of your electricity bill. If you spend on average $200/month in electricity, that adds up to $2,400/year. 10% of that is $240, which is more than one month's utility bills or 48 Subway foot long sandwiches, depending on your perspective.

One easy thing I do in my home: I hook up every TV (and any complimentary product like DVD, stereo, etc.) to a surge strip. Besides trying to protect them from fluctuations in supply, it also allows me to simply flip 1 switch to eliminate their vampire loads. So I have 3 TVs. Two of them might go days without drawing any power. The one we mainly use (which also has a Blu-Ray player, stereo, PS2, and Wii on the same strip) draws power for, at most, 6 hours a day.

Once your old Edison bulbs burn out, changing them out for more efficient ones will also make a difference. While I don't own a Kill-a-Watt, I do recall seeing (in our former house) the electricity bill go down about $5/month when I changed out about 4-5 bulbs.

I can only speak to the items I tested in my home, but nothing used anything close to 80% of operational power just to read the remote. In fact, outside of the cable box, I couldn't find anything that used more than 1 W when off. A permanent draw of 1W comes to ~0.73 kWhr per month, and I average ~700 kWhr/mo, so each of these vampire devices might account for 0.1% of my usage. Being generous, perhaps 1-2% of my consumption is going to these vampire devices. And to the extent that this power goes to something useful, like giving me the time or reading a remote, this is not actually a waste at all. If 10% of your electricity usage is going to standby power, something is probably broken or very badly designed.

I had a professor who actually solved the cable box problem by plugging it into an outlet wired to turn off with the same light switch he would flip when leaving the room. The problem was that the cable box was not designed to have its power cycled regularly, so it quickly failed. Also, people probably wouldn't want to do that today since the DVR has to be on to make recordings. What's really needed here is better regulation. If the companies making these boxes actually cared about standby power, it would be a pretty simple engineering problem to dramatically improve the situation.

[jim]

I did not know that anyone knew how many kWhr they average per month. That is amazing. I couldn't even put the right number of 0's on a guess.

[mikechamp]

AD: I'd be interested in knowing what the reading is on your garage door opener.

[mikechamp]

If 10% of your electricity usage is going to standby power, something is probably broken or very badly designed.

I was getting my 10% number from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

http://standby.lbl.gov/

[Socnorb11]

We're saving about $24 per month by enrolling in Time Management Pricing with our electric company. Basically, any usage between 9:00 p.m. and 7:00 a.m., and weekends, is only charged at 50%, and any usage during prime hours (7:00 a.m. until 9:00 p.m. on weekdays) is charged at 125%. We do laundry loads after 9:00, run the dishwasher in the morning when I get up, etc. It's turned out to be very little inconvenience for fairly substantial savings.

I'm not sure if every electric company offers these plans, though.

[mikechamp]

My house has terrible insulation, single pane windows everywhere, leaky ducts, exposed foundation that saps a ton of heat from the floor when it's cold, etc. In order to cool my upstairs bedroom enough to sleep comfortably, I have to set the thermostat so it is too chilly downstairs. Unfortunately, as a renter I don't have too many options, but I was thinking of getting a home energy audit anyway to see if maybe there are some relatively cheap options that might improve the situation.

AD: Here's a primer from the Dept. of Energy on home energy audits. It includes the perspective of both the energy auditor and the homeowner:

http://energy.gov/articles/energy-saver ... rgy-audits

[mikechamp]

We're saving about $24 per month by enrolling in Time Management Pricing with our electric company. Basically, any usage between 9:00 p.m. and 7:00 a.m., and weekends, is only charged at 50%, and any usage during prime hours (7:00 a.m. until 9:00 p.m. on weekdays) is charged at 125%. We do laundry loads after 9:00, run the dishwasher in the morning when I get up, etc. It's turned out to be very little inconvenience for fairly substantial savings.

I'm not sure if every electric company offers these plans, though.

Socnorb11: You bring up an interesting topic, and that is the one of getting paid for inconvenience. I like to think of your behavioral change as the manual version of the smart grid. That's not meant as any disrespect to you. Rather, what you are doing now is what the smart grid (and all equipped appliances) will do automatically in 10 years. You're simply getting a financial advantage, to the tune of ~$288/year, for the current lack of a smart grid. Good for you!

Also, before anyone jumps to any conclusions, smart grid-enabled appliances will not become overruling robots. You'll still retain the ability to run your appliance whenever you want. But if you want to reduce your utility costs, you can enable the smart grid feature and enjoy savings like Socnorb11 already is.

[Arthur Dent]

AD: I'd be interested in knowing what the reading is on your garage door opener.

I open my garage door the old fashioned way, so no standby power. As a result of this thread, I updated the standby power inventory for all the stuff plugged in and on my TV cabinet (most of my electronics). I've added a couple gadgets since I last checked this. In total, about 48 W of "standby" power is consumed. Almost half of that, 23 W, comes from the cable DVR. In descending order, the draws are:
Cable DVR: 23 W
Cable modem: 6 W
Network HDD: 5 W
Subwoofer: 5 W
AV Receiver: 4 W
Wireless router: 3 W
PC: 1 W
Playstation: 1 W
HD PVR: < 1 W
TV: < 1 W

Besides the DVR, the real offenders here are the subwoofer, AV receiver, and network HDD, none of which have any good reason to use more than one watt of standby power. This is just bad design. Notice that the TV uses less than one watt even though it has to power an IR remote receiver. The cable modem and wireless router don't really (and probably can't) have a standby mode, so it's not surprising they use some power.

The 48 W of standby power equates to about 35 kWHr/mo, ~5 % of my total usage, and about $4.50/mo at 13¢/kWHr. If all these devices were better designed to use only 1 W of standby power, I could save about 24 KWHr/mo or about $3/mo.