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section 2

Some appliances draw electricity from

your wall even when they’re not “on.”Frequently this “vampire” or “phantom”load is providing you a service you don’treally need, such as the ability to turn onyour TV with the remote control evenwhen you’re asleep or away.

If you have a lot of these vampires in the

house, they can add up to 10% of your

electricity use.

If you aren’t okay with that waste, use aKill A Watt meter to check your appli-ances for a vampire load.

The most likely vampires are the appli-ances that have large clunky plugs, useremote controls or have LED displaysthat are always on. These are the ones tocheck first.

Some of the most expensive vampire

“services” that appliances provide to youare:

• The DVR patrolling the cable chan-nels 24/7 for that that one weeklyshow you like to record.

• The cable box always being on, evenwhen you’re at work or asleep.

• The stereo and TV always ready to

be turned on with the remote con-trol.

For more information, check out

Forbes’ list of the 26 worst offenders.

“vampire”

loads

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How to reduce vampire

loads

• Energy savings per decade: Up to $602and 4,800 lbs. CO2 assuming you cutyour 10% vampire load in half

• Level of difficulty: Easy 

• Cost: $60 to $120 (assuming you needthree power strips)

• How long it takes: 1 hour

• Tools & materials: Kill A Watt meter, your appliances, the appropriatepower strips

1. Unplug an appliance.

2. Plug the Kill A Watt meter into the out-let, and then plug the appliance into theKill A Watt.

3. Press the center button on the Kill A Watt that says Watt . You might have totoggle it until the screen says Watt  in-

stead of VA.

4. Make sure the appliance is off.

5. If the Kill A Watt shows that the appli-ance is still drawing energy (i.e., thewatts number shown on the screendoesn't go down to 0.0), then the appli-ance is a vampire.

6. Use our Vampire Load Calculator to figure out how much it’s cost-ing you.

7. If the vampire load from an appli-ance is more than $10 a year and youdon’t need the “service” the applianceis providing you when it’s off, then it

might be worth plugging the applianceinto a power strip and the power stripinto the wall. That way when you don’tneed the appliance, you can  rea lly turn it off by clicking off the power strip.

 Any time the power strip is clicked off, thevampire appliance won’t be able to suck anyelectricity at all.

There are a lot of great power strips for differ-

ent applications, and companies are comingup with more every day. Here are some of ourfavorites:

• Belkin Conserve is helpful for entertain-ment centers. It automatically turns offthe peripheral devices plugged into it(such as speakers and monitors) whenyou turn off the main device (such as theTV). This means you can click off the TVwith your remote control as normal, and

all the speakers and monitors will magi-cally turn off too. Here’s a video explain-ing it. Costs about $30.

• The Belkin Conserve Remote power

strip comes with a switch that works as aremote to turn the power strip on or off.The switch has an adhesive on the back,so you can stick it on the wall in some

convenientlocation toflick off thepower stripwhen youleave theroom, thesame wayyou’d turnoff a light.This helps ifthe powerstrip is lo-cated some-where that’sdifficult toreach or ifyou don’t

tend to remember to click off the powerstrip if the switch isn’t handy. Costsabout $40.

• Home Depot programmable power

strip allows you to program the powerstrip so it turns off automatically at nightwhen you’re sleeping or during weekdayswhen you’re at work. You can programthe power strip once and never have toremember to turn everything off again.

Smart. It works well with cable boxes andDVRs to turn them off for those hours youare not watching or recording shows. Pro-gram them to turn back on before youneed them so they have enough time towarm up and reset.

• An appliance timer (OK, this isn’t really apower strip) turns your appliances auto-matically on and off at different times dur-

 

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ing the day and night using simple greenand red pins. It’s not as slick as some ofthe other options and you can only plugone appliance into it, but it costs just $11.

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