.

How Many Vampires Do You Have In Your House?

All those devices sucking tiny amounts of electricity from the grid.

Would you believe it is costing Americans 19 billion dollars a year.

That’s the figure a new report from the National Resource Defense Council puts on vampire energy usage.

To put it in perspective that’s $165.00 per year per household on average. In higher rate areas it would equate to $440.00.

Or put another way it keeps 50 large power plants running with all their CO2 emissions.

“One reason for such high idle energy levels is that many previously purely mechanical devices have gone digital: Appliances like washers, dryers, and fridges now have displays, electronic controls, and increasingly even Internet connectivity, for example,” says Pierre Delforge, the report’s author and NRDC’s director of high-tech sector energy efficiency. “In many cases, they are using far more electricity than necessary.”

Two major offenders that we’ve discussed before are TV cable boxes and video game consoles. Cable boxes are the second largest energy user in many people’s homes because they are always running even when they are turned off thanks to spinning hard drives, program guide updates and software downloads. Video game consoles can be major power hogs and the systems’ stand-by modes leave much to be desired. Many users are reluctant to shut them off completely because restarting them can take such a long time when updates have to be installed.

While studies have focused on these individual electronics in the past, the NRDC study is the first to analyze the impact of all the idle electronics in our lives. The group looked at energy usage data from electric utility smart meters in 70,000 northern California homes as well as field measurements that concentrated on idle loads. They found an average of 65 vampire power loads in homes, including things like appliances, devices in standby mode (even things like garage door openers), electronics in sleep mode like game consoles and TVs, and devices like computers that are left fully on, but are not in use.

Get more details at the original article.

Image from the original article.

Is this just another way to tax the peasants?