Halloween Energy Conservation: Phantoms and Vampires in Your Home
Posted by DavidM in Save energy | 30 October 2006
By Dan Fink of Other Power
My home is infested with phantoms and vampires! Yours most likely is, too. They suck electricity right from your outlets 24 hours a day, seven days a week and waste it, turning it very inefficiently into heat. I'm not referring to any supernatural phenomenon, but instead to so-called 'phantom loads' and 'energy vampires' - appliances that use power even when they are turned off.
It's estimated that in first-world nations, about six percent of the average home's power usage goes to powering these energy suckers, which appliance manufacturers prefer to call 'standby power loads'. A typical home consumes from 50 to 120 watts of electricity continuously to power phantom loads. Call it 100 watts to make the math simple, and this adds up to 876 kilowatt-hours per year. At typical electric utility rates in the US, that's US$50-90.
Or to put it in more disturbing figures, that's approximately 876 lbs. (397 kg) of coal, 350 lbs. (159 kg) of natural gas, 508 lbs. (230 kg) of oil or 0.0007 lbs. (.0003 kg) of enriched uranium - for every home, every year! (Source: Nuclear Energy Institute)
I'm in a somewhat different situation. I live 11 miles (17.7 kilometers) from the nearest electric line here in the mountains of Colorado, USA, and I have to generate all my power on-site with solar and wind. So, I designed my home to be extremely energy-efficient and selected efficient appliances accordingly. I use about 1/10 th of the US average monthly home electricity consumption, and the people in a typical US home use about twice the amount of electricity per year as a European home.
If I did not control my phantom loads carefully, I'd need to invest thousands of dollars in more solar panels, wind turbines and storage batteries into feeding the vampires. Since I must monitor my power usage so closely, any waste is quickly apparent on my power system meters and I can deal with it immediately. For this article, I used my main power system meter to measure the phantom loads.
Identifying phantom loads
Any appliance that can be turned on from a distance using a remote control is a phantom load.
This includes most home entertainment centers, sound systems, televisions, DVD players, cable and satellite TV boxes, garage door openers, and more. The appliance uses power at all times, patiently waiting for you to hit the on button on your remote control. My modest TV-VCR-DVD-speaker system uses 27 watts whenever it's plugged in.
Any appliance that can be turned on with a momentary pushbutton instead of a physical on-off switch is a phantom load.
This includes most desktop computers and many modern major appliances like dishwashers, clothes washers and dryers, microwave ovens, kitchen ranges, and more. These phantoms don't use as much power as items with remotes, but they still average about one or two watts each. Since a typical home will have a dozen or more such appliances plugged in at any time, the power waste still adds up quickly.
Any 'wall wart' transformer is a phantom load.
Wall wart is the popular term for the ubiquitous and mysterious black cubes that infest nearly every small electronic device these days. They don't use much power, either - again, about one or two watts each. But start tallying them up in your home... My list includes the computer printer, routers, scanner, powered speaker system, PDA charger, digital camera charger, laptop charger and I-Pod charger on the computer side of the house alone!
Eliminating phantom loads
Some phantom loads are essential.
Ground fault interrupter outlets, smoke detectors and carbon monoxide detectors are also phantom loads. Obviously, you don't want to eliminate these important safety items. Your home heating furnace is probably a phantom load, it's waiting for your thermostat to tell it to turn on, no matter if it's gas or electric. And unless all the clocks in your home run on batteries, you probably want at least some of them to show the correct time instead of constantly blinking 12:00 all day and night.
Most phantom loads can be eliminated.
The key is power strips and switched outlets. Power strips can be installed anywhere, switched outlets must be considered when a new house is designed, or be re-wired by an electrician. My home has separate power strips in a few essential areas. Essential items that must run all the time are plugged directly into the wall outlets, non-essential items are plugged into power strips that can be turned off.
For example, the home office: By turning on one power strip I can activate just the satellite modem and routers so that I can use the internet from my laptop anywhere in the house. If I need the more powerful desktop computer and all its associated printers, scanners and other gadgets, I can turn on a separate power strip for all of those - and all those items combined use as much power when they are turned OFF as the internet/laptop combination does when it's turned ON!
My home entertainment center is configured similarly. It's nice to have at least one clock on the system showing the right time, so my DVD recorder is plugged directly into the outlet and can't be turned completely off. It always shows the correct time. If I want to set it to record a show from the TV, I simply turn on a second power strip that controls the satellite TV box - now the system can record any show I wish, while the TV and sound system still remain unplugged from the wall. To actually watch TV or a movie, I turn on a third power strip that everything else is plugged into.
I keep a few other phantom loads in operation 24/7. The clocks on the microwave and kitchen range are handy, and only use about a watt each. My two-way amateur radio draws about the same, and it's on all the time too. Small wall wart battery chargers like those for the laptop, I-Pod, digital cameras, rechargeable flashlights (torches), GPS units and such each use a watt or two even when the device itself is not attached for charging, so I simply unplug the chargers when not needed. That's a much kinder way to treat those delicate rechargeable batteries
anyway.
Conclusion
It would take some very fuzzy math to speculate on how many coal, gas, oil or nuclear power plants could be shut down if everyone paid attention to chasing the electrical phantoms and vampires from their homes, but the number would be significant. Appliance and gadget manufacturers could help by designing equipment that incorporates actual, physical, on/off switches that stop all power from flowing to a device. I personally don't find it too much of a hassle to walk across the room to flip a switch instead of using a remote, and a physical toggle or paddle switch doesn't take all that much more effort to use than pushing an 'instant on' button.
For now, the best defense against energy phantoms and vampires on the grid is unplugging things when you're not using them, or buying and using switched power strips. Your energy savings in one year could easily pay for the cost of outfitting your entire home with power strips.
Inexpensive kilowatt-hour meters like the P3 International 'Kill-O-Watt' can be used to track how much power any individual appliance or gadget uses, on or off. Simply plug the meter into a wall outlet, and plug the appliance into the meter. Off-grid dwellers quickly learn how to track down the phantoms this way. If I let my off-grid energy vampires get out of control, they'd suck up about a quarter of the incoming energy I get from solar and wind each day.
Comments
This is a great article, particularly like the title.
For some time I've been wondering about all those little red lights that appear to be on full time!
I assume by power strips Dan, in U.K. terms you are talking about plug boards, or extension leads.
This being the case, then I guess the only thing to make sure is that you don't overload a single socket and try to power the washing machine, dishwasher, dryer etc from it.
Anyway great post!
