- Intro
- Reducing electricity consumption I: Lighting
- Reducing electricity consumption II: vampire/standby power
- Reducing electricity usage III: major appliances
- Renewable energy for the home
- Cutting the cord
- Reducing heating and cooling costs
- Reducing water consumption
Welcome back to this very long, excruciatingly detailed look at how you can save a crap-ton of money by retrofitting your home for better energy conservation.
We've first taken care of lightbulbs, some of the lowest hanging fruit. But that only accounted for about a third of my impressive energy savings (as we saw in part I of this series, down $1,800 per year over the last three years, or nearly 48 percent, despite having a larger household). The next big chunk? Eliminating standby power—that continous 24/7 sucking of electricity by myriad devices in the house when they're otherwise not performing their main function. That's why it's also called "vampire power" or "phantom loads."
When I first began looking at standby power, I was losing about 396 watts per hour to plugged in devices, for the most part of the day doing nothing. That meant 9.5 kWh per day, or 3.469 kWh and $659 given my average electricity rate here in California of $0.19/kWh.
Today, my standby power losses are 178 watts per hour, or 4.272 kWh per day, or 1559 kWh and $296 per year. That's a 45 percent reduction, and that $296 accounts for about a sixth of my overall savings. And I've got a roadmap to dramatically slice that number down even further, so that I'm paying just $63 per year in standby power, or over 90 percent less than when I began this journey.
Now these savings take a bit more work than merely swapping out bulbs, but they are real and can quickly add up. If I hadn't done anything to reduce use, I would've paid an extra $3,000 to the utility company over 10 years (more, since electricity rates consistently rise every year), and I can think of lots of better uses for that money than pissing it away to an evil utility. And when you get beyond the financial equation and consider the environmental benefits of reduced carbon emissions, it becomes a no-brainer. So today, we're going to look at standby power, and how we can squash it.
Please read below the fold to follow my energy-saving journey.
The dirty little secret of modern electronics is that the "off" button actually doesn't really turn off a device. The vast majority of electronic and electric devices (there's a difference) continue to draw electricity. Your television will continue drawing power so that it can sense if the remote control calls it to action. Your toaster oven might draw power simply because of cheap internal components. A power brick will continue to draw power because I don't know why, but there's a reason it's warm to the touch.
You can see a chart of the standby power of many devices here, and that's helpful to give you a general sense of how much your devices are wasting when they're off.
For example, a printer can be using over five watts, a cable modem about 4-6 watts, and a coffee maker a little over a watt.
Count the number of devices in your house, and yeah, the annual cost of each device may not be much. For every watt of standby power, you are using 8.8 kWh of juice per year. At the $0.19 I pay in California, that's $1.66. But add up those individual watts by the hundreds, and the numbers become real.
Here's another way to look at it: My current average daily consumption is about 15.56 kWh per day (lower now, but that's my average over the past year). For every two watts of standby power I eliminate, that's like getting a free day of electricity. And that's an investment that carries on forever, in perpetuity. A free day this year, and next year, and the one after that. So where to get started? Like with lightbulbs, it starts with an audit of every device in your home.
The audit
I gave you guys a look at my crazy-looking energy spreadsheet yesterday, here it is again. Remember, that's my own personal scratchpad, so I don't expect you to make sense of it. I'm certainly not going to spend time making it fit for public consumption. But if you look down the left side, I essentially went into every single room in my house and listed each device, then I measured or researched how much power each one used when in the "off" or standby mode.
For anything plugged into the wall, I used a watt meter, basically this one:
I paid $20 for it, but it has been discontinued. But there are others at around the same price, like
this one and
this one on Amazon.
If a device wasn't plugged into the wall, I looked online until I could find the information. It wasn't easy, but I was able to find the information for the vast majority of items.
After you've catalogued your vampire draw, you can set a plan of attack. The reason I still have ~150 watts of eliminatable standby power is because it makes little sense to spend the money to eliminate these small loads, so really, this is about gradually reducing the load when the opportunities arise. Specifically:
1. Upgrade the really wasteful items first
2. Eliminate use completely, when possible
3. Find ways to completely cut power to devices when they aren't on.
4. Wait until it's replacement time, and choose a more efficient upgrade
Note that the specific definition of standby power is devices that are drawing electricity when they aren't doing their primary function. I've actually expanded the definition for myself, so it includes devices that are drawing a continuous load even if they're doing their required task. Thus, I included things like my aquarium pumps just because it was easier for me to make a plan of attack that way. Heck, I even lump my refrigerator into that category, even though for purposes of this series, I will talk about the fridge another day.
So anyway, let's get specific about my four-step plan of attack.
1. Upgrade the most wasteful items
My TV service is provided by DirecTV. My satellite box was drawing 45 watts, continuously. While it had a "sleep" function, it merely dropped consumption by a single watt. You see, devices with DVRs are continously recording, so even if you're not recording a specific show, it's recording the last hour of whatever channel you are on. Why? Who the hell knows.
If you have cable, you may be wasting even more on vampire draw. An NRDC study found that set-top boxes drew roughly 50 watts whether they were on or off, or about 446 kWh per year. At my rates, that would be about $85, for something that is on just a fraction of the day.
Then, earlier this year, DirecTV introduced a new settop box mid-last year that consumed 20 watts, less than half the draw of the previous model. I harassed the company until I had my replacement, for free—the most cost-effective upgrade of all. So if you're sitting on a cable box that you've had for a while, see if there's a newer more efficient model available. The cable companies are under a lot of pressure to improve their energy efficiency, so this could be a great way to save money for little effort.
Beyond that, I identified several aquarium pumps that were drawing ridiculous amounts of electricity so I upgraded there as well. Anything with a DC motor is generally far more efficient than old-school motors. For example, I have a bathroom fan designed to circulate air throughout my whole house. (My house is so well insulated that without a fan, the air would become stale and potentially dangerous.)
Well, as I was hunting down my continuous loads, I discovered that the fan was drawing a constant 17 watts. Again, this isn't a true standby loss since the fan is actually doing its job, but it was still a big chunk of continuous—3 percent of my daily usage. For a fan! As I went online to research it, turns out that the same company (Panasonic) recently introduced a new DC-motor version of the fan. So instead of drawing 17 watts, it draws six. That meant 264 fewer watt hours per day, or 105 kWh less per year. Swapping it out was the equivalent of getting about a week's worth of electricity. And the cost? Only $170. So given that I'll save about $20 per year, that means a payoff time of 8 1/2 years (without taking into consideration increasing rates). Given the build and simplicity of this thing (it's a fan!), I'm pretty confident it'll last that long and even longer. And by swapping fans I ended up shaving nearly two percent of my entire household usage.
So when you find a device that uses a significant amount of continuous draw, look at the efficiency of alternatives and calculate whether it makes financial sense to upgrade. Still, odds are, there will be few devices that merit replacement from a financial perspective. But that's okay, because there are other ways to mitigate the continuous draw of your remaining devices.
2. Eliminate use completely, when possible
Sometimes, it doesn't make sense to replace a device sucking a lot of juice, but you might realize that you don't need the device sucking power at all!
For example, I once had three wi-fi routers throughout my relatively small 2,000 square foot home. One for upstairs, one downstairs toward the back, so it would reach the garage/workout room, and one downstairs front because that's where my wife has her home office. Once I realized that I was needlessly drawing about 8 extra watts for this convenience, I was able to reposition (with some trial and error) my routers so that I could accomplish full coverage throughout the house with one fewer router. I'm convinced that eventually I can make do with just one.
Another massive chunk of my continuous power consumption are my saltwater and freshwater planted aquariums (88 watts of continuous use, day and night, not including things like lights that only run during the day), both of which will soon be out of my house since the kids have lost all interest in them. Only question is where they're going—either the office or the kids' school. In a way, that's cheating—moving their carbon consumption from the home to another location. But if I didn't have places interested in hosting those aquariums I'd just shut them down. They've served their purpose and there's no need to keep them running in my home any longer.
Beautiful, but power thirsty.
It's nice to simplify your life by reducing the number of plugged in devices. As you do your audit, really consider if a device is worth keeping plugged in. Do you have a VCR in the guest bedroom, blinking "12:00" in the off-chance that you'll someday have a guest with a VCR tape to watch? Get rid of that thing for heaven's sake! (Old VCRs can be particularly inefficient.) What about an extra computer in a backroom that no one uses because you all have your own laptops? Or better yet, tablets? Reduce clutter, save money, reduce carbon. Those are all good things!
In this category, I have a big one planned for early next year: Cutting the cord. I'll talk more about this in a future installment, but as mentioned above, cable and satellite systems are notorious power hogs. For satellite, it's not just a matter of the satellite box itself. All told, once you account for the power used by the satellite dish itself and other components, my DirecTV system, even after the latest box upgrade, is still drawing 42 watts, or over 1 kWh per day—about 8 percent of my total usage for something that is on 3-4 hours a day! That's $70 a year and a shit-ton of carbon, on top of an additional $1K+ that I spend on programming. I've done the research and math, and I could shave the vast majority of that, with little impact on access to programming, by eliminating the entire system altogether. So a close examination of what you have plugged in can really lead to greater savings elsewhere.
3. Find ways to completely cut power to devices when they aren't on.
Upgrading and eliminating are good options for some of your devices, but odds are that the bulk of them are necessary for one reason or another. So the trick is to have them suck power when they need to suck power, and have them turned off whenever you are not.
There are several tools you can use to make this happen. First, there's the outlet switch. I use
these Belkin switches you see on the right.
They have a little switch that you turn on and off to control flow into a plugged-in device. I put these everywhere, on the treadmill, which would otherwise suck four watts of standby power, on the coffee maker, which sucks 1.3 watts, on the toaster oven, which sucks two watts, and on the printer, which sucked four watts. I mean, I have the things everywhere, and while it took the family a bit of time to get used to switching them off, it's now second-nature for them. At a bit over $6 bucks a pop, they take about three years to pay for themselves (on average, at my rates). But like I've said before, for each two always-on watts I eliminate, it's like getting a free day of electricity. These switches have allowed me to eliminate about 12 watts of phantom power, so that's six days of electricity I eliminate, nearly a week when power plants aren't burning fossil fuels for my benefit. (Heck, you can save yourself the $6 and simply unplug those devices when not in use.)
But those switches only work great for single appliances plugged into outlets within easy reach. What if you have a whole rack of devices, like a home entertainment center or home office? That's where "smart" or "green" power strips come into play, like
this one, by Smart Strip.
The way this works is that you plug in your centerpiece device on the "control" outlet (the blue one on this device), so essentially your television or computer. Then you plug in accessory devices on the switchable outlets. So for example, you'd have your TV in the control outlet, and then the amplifier, streaming box, video game console (huge power hogs), DVD player and so on on the switchable outlets. All those devices are off and drawing zero power until the TV is turned on. For a computer, the accessory devices could be printers, scanner, external hard drives, etc.
Strips like this one work great, in particular, if your power strip is in a hard-to-reach location. Otherwise, buy a cheap strip and have everything turned off until you switch it on.
You can also use any old outlet timer, like the ones you use to control lights when you are gone. If you know no one watches TV from midnight to 7 AM, stick it on a timer. Same with a coffee machine, or an electrical water heater, or whatever.
If you have a home automation getup, you can even have outlets or strips that you can program via smartphone app. That's what I do with my home entertainment system—I completely shut it down from 1-6:15 AM. It takes about 20 minutes for the satellite box to boot up, so that gives enough time for everything to be booted back up and ready by 7 AM, when the kids eat their breakfast in front of Regular Show and Adventure Time. That five hours the system is shut down saves me 135 watts per day, which means an annual savings of 49 kWh per year and $9.31.
4. Wait until it's replacement time, and choose a more efficient upgrade
You didn't give energy efficiency a second thought when you bought your current devices. But now, you know better! It's rarely worth upgrading a device merely because of phantom power, but if you're in the market for, say, a new microwave, it now makes sense to spend a minute or two checking to see if the model you like is efficient 24/7. For example, I have a perfectly fine working cable modem. But looking around, I see that newer models draw 2-3 fewer watts of continuous power than my current one. I won't upgrade to save those few watts, but when it DOES become time to do so, I will make sure I take vampire draw into consideration. (And as an aside, if you are paying your cable company to "rent" your cable modem, STOP NOW! Buy your own modem and save money in the long haul.)
All told, eliminating vampire loads may have been the most enjoyable part of my energy-efficiency journey. The amount of money saved on power pales compared to other options, but it has really forced me to examine what is important to my lifestyle. When all is said and done, I'll be saving about a grand a year when I cut the cord, and that's not something I would've considered before my vampire-draw audit.
As for me, let's look at my consumption trends again:
See that standby power trend? Consistently down, even as winter consumption increases (mostly heating). That only bodes well for my overall consumption going forward.
So, use this as an opportunity not just to shave a few hundred bucks a year, even though that has its own value (had I done this a decade ago, I'd have an extra $3,000 in my pockets today). Use this as an opportunity to simplify your life, get rid of clutter and unnecessary devices.