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…
Jerry
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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.
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Posted 11 May 2005 at 5:24 am ¶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!"
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Posted 11 May 2005 at 5:54 pm ¶Post a Comment