Well, there are devices that you can use to measure how much electricity these appliances are actually using. I bought one because I thought I might be able to save myself some money, save the world a little, suggest a great Father’s Day gift and get a topic for an article out of it.
I bought a Kill-A-Watt P4400 from Amazon.com (I tried to buy it locally, but couldn’t find it anywhere). You just plug it into the wall and then plug the things you want to test into it. It gives you a bunch of information about the electricity flowing through it. The only thing I was concerned with was watts. With that number you can estimate what it would cost to leave that appliance plugged in for a year.
You can skip this paragraph if you are math adverse. Electricity is sold by the kilowatt hour, so to get from watts to kilowatt hours you multiple the number of watts times the number of hours. If an appliance draws one watt while off and you leave it plugged in all year, that’s 24 hours x 365 days = 8,760 watt hours. Divide that by 1,000 and you get 8.76 kilowatt hours per year. Multiply that by the rate per kilowatt hours, (I pay .06358) and you get about 56 cents a year to use one watt an hour.
Did I find a bunch of heavy duty vampires in my apartment? To my surprise, I didn’t.
My home office network, which includes a DSL modem, a wireless router, an IP phone router and a cordless phone, only uses a total of 10 watts. That’s only $5/year. The computers used less than I expected — 60 watts each while on. Two of the three must be on 24 hours a day. The third, my laptop, uses two watts while in sleep mode, none while hibernating. The only shocker was my printer. It was using seven watts while “off.” I didn’t have the patience to wait for it to go into “power-saver” mode. I’m leaving that unplugged since I only print once ever few months. Nothing else I measured used more than two watts while off.
I wasn’t too impressed with the Kill-A-Watt, but to be fair, it wasn’t the Kill-A-Watt’s fault. It was just that I didn’t have any big vampires in my apartment. Chances are, you might. The average American household has 10 appliances drawing more than 20 watts each while not in use. That’s more than $100 per year. So, if your dad is into gadgets, saving the world or is just cheap, the Kill-A-Watt just might be a good idea.
Jeremy Hutchinson, owner of Foreside Technology, assists local businesses with purchasing, configuring and maintaining their computers, servers and networks. You can reach him at jeremy@foresidetech.com.