April 22nd is the 40th anniversary of Earth Day. Originally it was about awareness and appreciation of the Earth – but we like to think it’s a good time to change a habit or two. After all, our health is tied intrinsically to the health of the Earth.

So here’s one idea to get you started * Don’t just turn off – unplug.

It’s called vampire electricity (or, more boringly, standby power), and it’s the electric power consumed by electronic appliances while they are switched off or in a standby mode. For example, your laptop has a power cord with an adaptor built into it (the boxy thing that makes the cord hard to wrap up, lol). Even if the laptop is off, if the cord is plugged in, the adaptor is drawing a small amount of electricity.

So what can you do? Don’t just turn off your small appliances – unplug them.

• Do you really need a clock on your coffee pot? No, so go ahead and unplug it. (What are you doing with caffeine anyway? Make a pot of tea or blend up a smoothie instead!)
• Plug your computers, televisions, stereos, and media systems into power strips, and turn them off at night (unless you’re recording the shopping channel, and then you need to get to the THM® on a Budget class right away!).
• Are your chargers always plugged in? We’ve become an e-society, and that means a lot of chargers – for your phone, PDA, reader, camera, music player … we could go on. Set up a charging station, maybe with a power strip, and use it each night to charge your toys. Then unplug everything in the morning.

All this vampire electricity adds up. The amount of standby power wasted varies among electronic equipment, but overall, the cost to consumers and businesses for all the electricity lost to vampire power in the US is estimated to be $4 billion annually. Sure, some of that is necessary. But if we all get a little smarter about what we really need and what we’re just lazy about, we could make a measurable impact on the amount of electricity used. And since electricity taxes our non-renewable natural resources, that’s a good thing.

So don’t just turn it off – unplug it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 7th, 2010 at 9:31 am and is filed under Budget & Finance, Green living, Organizational tips for home and life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.