Look For Anything Plugged In and Warm
July 26, 2004 AM/Home
When I was a kid my Dad would run around the house turning off lights that nobody was using. It used to drive my sister and I nuts because half the time we were still using them. But now, many years later I find myself doing much the same sort of thing. This really started with the drier that I wrote about in January. Fixing that had helped reduce our bill, but it didn't drop it as much as I thought it would. So over the past several months I've been on the hunt for where the rest of our bill has been going.
I saved some money by unplugging our electric toothbrushes. They didn't need to charge every night, and I could feel the charger "base" was warm even when the toothbrush wasn't plugged into it. Then there were some bike light battery rechargers we had plugged in all the time drawing current even when they weren't plugged into the batteries. Same with a camera battery recharger. To save space one month we replaced two aging desktop computers with laptops and it turned out that we saved well over $10 per month in power consumption. And so on. It was a lot of little things.
This month, I was telling my neighbor how psyched I was to have found another transformer/battery charger that was plugged into the wall continuously (and then I found another one today, the darn things are everywhere). I told him I thought I saved about $3/month unplugging it. He didn't believe me. And admittedly I didn't measure the wattage used by the transformer, I was just going off of the month to month bills which have plenty of variability. But it doesn't take much to start saving some significant money. And he was certainly surprised to discover that they're paying about what I was paying to PG&E (our utility company here in Northern California) before I went on the unplugging rampage. Which is about double what I'm paying now.
You are billed for kilowatt-hours (Kwh). In California this is billed at $0.116/Kwh for the first 366Kwh (Baseline) and then 0.133/Kwh above that. I'm pretty sure there are still more billing levels for the truly power hungry, but I never went higher than the first two.
A 100W light bulb (100Watts = 0.1Kilowatts) burning continuously for 30 days would burn through:
30days * 24hours/day * 0.1 Kilowatts = 72Kwh.
At $0.116/Kwh that'll run you about $8.35 ($9.58 if you're above baseline). Its the 720 hours in a 30 day billing cycle that kills you. Even a fraction of a 100W light bulb can add up pretty quickly. Your average desktop computer pulls about 120W in power save mode. That TiVo, probably about the same thing (its a basically a Linux computer) though I haven't looked since I don't own one. If you've got both, there's $20/month if you're not careful.
So today my neighbor went through their house and unplugged a number of things that really didn't need to be plugged in all the time. A couple accent lights. A few battery chargers. They changed the way they're using the drier and changed the settings on their computer from power save to hibernate. It'll be interesting to see what their bill comes to over the next few months. And has their lifestyle changed? Not at all. Other than hopefully an extra $50 or so in their pocket.