I had just read a Smedley Log entry on home
energy conservation when I saw today this article in the Post
Gazette, which
discusses
“energy leaks” in many modern appliances:
Electricity “leaks” are no laughing matter today. Cell phones,
computers,
monitors, DVD players, cable TV boxes and other electronic products
found in every
home and office these days are wasting huge amounts of energy.
The leaks occur because many electronic devices can’t be fully turned
off without
pulling the wall plug. While the knob or button may be turned off, in
reality, the
device may be in any of several standby modes, somewhere between fully
off and fully
on, wired so that its prongs draw electric current from the wall outlet
24/7.
I’m all for saving the environment and saving money (my tree-hugging
ways probably
predate my penny-pinching, but they dovetail pretty well), and I imagine
many of
this blog’s readers will be similarly interested. I’m also reevaluating
when I should
put my computer on stand-by and be more aggressive in just turning the
thing off
altogether…
dude. Hook up your entertainment center to a power strip and kill it when you’re done with it. Then again, all the appliances hooked to the power strip will be attached to power, even if you just want to utilize one item. If you really want to save power, set up kill switches on all your appliances. Then again, you’d have to reset the VCR and TV clocks, and you’d lose all your electronic settings by using a kill switch. But I think it’s worth it, and I’ll try it this summer.
I must say that I found this vindicating –I remember an old roommate had this huge boombox, and the fool thing would never completely turn off. Oh, people would say that it was just a trivial amount of juice that it was using, but I was irritated with a machine that would not be off when I turned it off.
Now I’m vindicated! Ha! And once again, I say “ha!”