The “Shocking” Truth About Phantom Power in Your Home
Lately much is being written about energy saving and how phantom power leakage in your home and office is costing you more than you know. But how much of that is pure hyperbole? Are you really throwing money away when you leave your television and stereo set plugged-in but turned off? We’ll show to how to find out for yourself if it’s even worth bending over to unplug that device. And we promise not to use any more worn-out power puns from now on.
Unfortunately, the companies making claims about phantom power leakage are the ones selling the tools to measure it, so you try not to fall into their trap. Here’s the good news: I’ve taken the dive and splurged on the $ 20.00 Kill-a-Watt power meter to find out for you, so you can save the money and buy 5 gallons of gas for your car instead (at current prices in late May in Maryland - by the time you read this, that $ 20.00 might buy significantly less.)
What is phantom power? It is a term coined to describe the power being consumed by an appliance when it is switched off but not unplugged. For example, turning off your television screen might not stop power consumption because the internal transformer is still connected to the socket and “leaking” power. In addition, other components, such as an LCD clock, display or status light might consume additional power.
How does one solve the problem? Most effectively, unplugging the device entirely from its socket is the best cure, but that can be inconvenient, and might also wear out your plug. Who wants to bend down and reach behind the entertainment center so many times a day to unplug the TV?
Another option is to use a power strip or a smart strip. You can plug multiple devices into a power strip, but just make sure that the total wattage of all the devices does not exceed the power strip’s electrical rating to avoid a fire hazard, or more likely, tripped fuses. How do you know if you have exceeded the maximum? We’ll get to that later.
What is the difference between a power strip and a smart strip? A power strip lets you plug a number of electrical appliances into a single outlet and has a single flip switch which turns all of the appliances on or off together.
A smart strip is similar, except that one of the outlets is “smart,” that is, it senses if it is being used or not. If it is not being used, it will turn off all the appliances on the strip. Why is this useful? For example, if you leave your computer on overnight, you can program it to shut down if its power manager is easy to use. When the smart strip senses the lower power usage of your computer, it will turn off the other plugs to, thus turning off other power consumers like your printer, fax machine, table lamp, external computer speakers, etc. It is estimated that this can save over $ 100.00 per year in electrical power, far more than the cost of the smart strip.
Not too bad from an ROI perspective: Pay $ 30 for a smart strip, save $ 100 per year. Want more returns? Install more energy saving products! After all, do you own stocks or real estate that return over 300% annually?
Like we mentioned above, the smart strips work well with an enhanced power manager for your computer, which operates on all Windows platforms and MAC better than the natively installed utility application. Download a trial copy for free now! (While it’s still free…)
Terrific - it pays for itself in a matter of months on a computer, but what about the other appliances? As promised in the beginning of this article, this is where we show you the money, or power, using an inexpensive electric meter called a “Kill a Watt.”
The following tests were done with the above pictured Kill-a-Watt device as described:
Figure 1 - Kill a Watt measures 10 watts when TV, VCR, DVD Player, and Entertainment System are plugged in but turned off. As you can see, this is NOT costing you a fortune.
Using Maryland BG&E electricity rates of 11 cents per kWH: 10 watts = 0.01 kW.
So, 0.01 kW x $0.11/kWH x 24 hours / day x 365 days / year = $9.64 per year.
At this point, the Kill a Watt device’s annual ROI is about 50.
Figure 2 - No big surprises here. 0 watts measured when the power strip button was switched off. It just proves that it isn’t hard to save $ 9.64 and reduce some carbon dioxide output into our atmosphere too.
Figure 3- This time I turned on the VCR and DVD player, but did not press play. They were just sitting in standby as if you had finished a movie and did not turn them off. Do you want to know how much that is costing you?
As above, we calculate: 0.036 kW x 0.11 x 24 x 365 = $ 34.68 wasted per year. The Kill-a-Watt more than paid for itself by giving you the knowledge required to save energy.
And that’s at competitive Baltimore Gas & Electric rates of 11 cents per kWH. What are your electricity rates?
Remember, your electric rates are going up every year! By alot!
Figure 4 - Same as in figure 3, but I also turned on the entertainment system, but did not play anything. Just left it on as if a song had finished playing and we went to bed for the night without turning it off.
0.067 x 0.11 x 24 x 365 = $ 64.56 per year in wasted electricity costs! That’s not much, but it’s 3 times the cost of the Kill-a-Watt meter, without which you would not be discovering these opportunities to save power.
Wait! This was just the VCR, DVD Player, and Entertainment System, and they weren’t even being used.
What happens when you leave the TV on? How about the space heater when nobody is using it? Why don’t you calculate those numbers yourself? You might be shocked by the answer! (Hint: A TV can easily consume 240 watts of electricity, and more, depending on its size and technology, while a space heater typically consumes between 1000 - 1600 watts.) Go ahead and run those numbers!
Click on the Kill a Watt banner below and buy one for a miserly $ 20.00+ and you will be on the road to saving HUNDREDS OF DOLLARS! Remember, you can’t save what you cannot see, so the first step to saving hundreds of dollars, if not thousands, is to buy yourself a Kill a Watt and a Smart Strip or two. With the $ 30.00 Amazon Card rebate you get prior to check-out, you will get these devices almost for free. Buy them now and start saving:
Well, you might say that it’s not solely up to you to save money by turning appliances off. Your spouse, kids, in-laws love to stick it to the man (you) by leaving everything on.
If that’s the case, stay tuned for the next blogs where we show you how to stick it right back at them! (In a way that won’t leave you living in the dog house.)
Or, if you are interested in saving REALLY big money, take a look at our blog on why you are paying about 30% more for your home cooling than a commercial customer would! After all, in the summer, air conditioning can account for 50-80% of you electricity costs, depending on how you set your thermostat.
Here is a snippet from another blog with similar ideas:
Going Green, Really
I’ve always suspected that a good portion of the “Going Green” options are questionable if not outright scams. A good example is the latest rage in Compact Fluorescent Lights (CFLs). They are touted as being longer lasting and using less energy for the same amount of light (they are, of course correspondingly more expensive). This seems to be true. BUT (and this is a big BUT), they also contain Mercury, a highly toxic chemical. When the bulbs are disposed of they will poison landfills, etc. (The caveat that they should be “properly disposed of” is manifest nonsense – they will just be thrown in the trash). So it is an open question as to whether CFL’s just amount to trading a current problem for a future one (you can always use less electricity; can Mercury poisoning be undone?).
But here’s an idea that DOES make sense. How many of the little power cubes do you have attached to various devices - computer speakers, portable docking stations for laptops; docking stations for older smart phones, LCD monitors, answering machines, printers, etc.
Tags: computer power, faronics, kill-a-watt, passive power, phantom power, power manager, power strip, printer power, smart strip, television power, tv power
July 15th, 2008 at 5:10 am
*sigh*
Lot’s of misinformation circulating about CFLs. Current CFLs contain between 2mg and 5mg of elemental mercury which is a very tiny amount. If you have any tooth fillings, there is more mercury in your mouth than that right now. And, of course, the bulbs only have to be disposed of a tenth as often as incandescents.
Elemental mercury is not “highly toxic”. Certain organic compounds of mercury, like dimethyl mercury, are,
Furthermore, coal contains trace amounts of mercury. If you consider the mercury released into the atmosphere by coal-fired power plants, you find that the reduction in mercury emissions due to the energy savings of the cfl more than offsets that tiny bit of elemental mercury in the bulb.
That said, recycling is good. Home Depot, among other retail chains happily accept CFL’s for recycling.
Dispensing this kind of misinformation is far more damaging than persuading people to unplug a 3w power cube makes up for. In that way, this no doubt well intended article does the world a disservice.
http://tinyurl.com/5n2qdd
July 15th, 2008 at 5:41 am
Hello Steve,
Thank you for your comments - I appreciate your information about quantities of mercury from various sources, including CFL’s.
I agree about the power cubes not being significant. The snippet about them was quoted from another article.
Regards,
Dennis
July 15th, 2008 at 1:59 pm
I hope I didn’t seem overly rude. I’ve seen so much misleading information, lately, regarding everything from mercury in cfls, to horribly misleading claims about the effects of cfl power factors, to claims that you still have to worry about the duty cycle of cfl bulbs or they are “no better than incandescent”. None of the claims bear up to informed scrutiny, (Increased cycling does have an effect on cfl life, but at current prices, cycle times of as low as 30 seconds still beat out incandescent on an economic basis.)
In a nutshell… use cfl bulbs. Turn them on and off just like you would incandescents. Use whatever wattage is most pleasing to you. (If you are unsure, use the higher wattage. (Much damage is done when people undersize and conclude that “CFLs are dim and/or have poor light quality”.) Preferably drop them by Home Depot or some other recycling center at the end of their lives. (And also recycle plastic, aluminum, etc, as well.) Save money. Help yourself. Help the world.
By the time you need to replace CFLs that you buy today, LED might or might not be a better option, so stay tuned over the next several years.
On a somewhat tangential note, I just today replaced the old 1990 Hotpoint 19 cu. ft. fridge provided by the apartment complex with a nifty new 4.5 cu. ft. fridge, which is really all I have ever needed. That is the final modification I’ve needed to keep my July, August and September electric usage here in Oklahoma under 500Kwh. (April was 357, May was 400, but June slipped up to 540. (Would likely have been more like 470 with the fridge replacment.) Yea!!!
And, oh yeah. My kill-a-watt should arrive within a week.
July 15th, 2008 at 3:07 pm
Not rude at all. Diverse comments are always welcome. Your comments are not even half as rude as mine were when discussing the “water car!” (On another posting…)
Thanks for your visit!
Dennis
October 31st, 2008 at 9:32 am
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