'Twas the night before the man from the electric company was supposed to visit and read the meter, so the company could send this month's bill - and not a creature, nor an appliance, was stirring, not even the new mousse mixer you picked up last week. Another red-letter month for energy efficiency - and electrical bill savings!
Or so you think; little do you suspect that there is one item in the house working overtime - the wheel on the electric meter itself, which keeps turning around and around in its little dance, demanding more and more money from you! And it's not just because of the refrigerator, as the brave souls who have unplugged that appliance know. The meter keeps turning even when the fridge is off the grid, and at a frighteningly quick pace, it seems.
There are many more appliances and devices in our homes that never quite get turned off nowadays than there used to be; those little red or green dots on microwaves, cordless phones, answering machines, etc. all add up. What's worse are the appliances that, even when they're turned off, are never quite "off." Known in the business as "vampires," these devices, such as computers, cell phone "brick" rechargers, and a slew of others, suck up the juice just by being plugged in! Billions are wasted on these do-nothing devices annually, so much so that in 2001, U.S. President George W. Bush ordered the government to get rid of the vampires (which consume 4-7 watts of electricity per hour even when turned off!) with energy efficient products.
Forget the Transylvanian connection; that's for the advanced energy-efficient folk. For the rest of us, including me, the issue of energy conservation tends to make the eyes roll. So we're spending a couple of extra cents a year by leaving the computer on all the time. As mother told us, it costs more to turn it off and on!
We're all for motherhood, but in this case, mom either didn't know what she was talking about, or she was on the "take" from Big Electricity. If you have a couple of PCs at home with a router (wireless or otherwise) that you leave on all the time, even if you've got a screen saver and a hard drive that goes into standby mode, you could be spending - are you ready for this? - an extra thousand dollars a year in power costs!