Our electrical usage has gone down over our previous year's usage by nearly 16% in January, which makes 8 straight months now!
And what's better, it seems the family is finally starting to "get it" and is helping me watch for things that need to be turned off. Woohoo!
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Jumping in here without reading your whole blog - but we cut our electrical bill by over 50% from one quarter to the next by turning off all our power strips at night or when not in use. Granted we were running a home based post-production boutique out of our house (lots of computers and monitors and related equipment) - the principle as explained to us by someone that came and did an 'energy audit' for us (as a trade for shooting and editing we did for his company) was that most consumer electronic equipment is actually DC - and either inside the box or as an external 'brick' you have an AC to DC converter or transformer.
Whether or not the device is actually switched on or off makes a negligible difference to the power consumption if the AC/DC converter is being fed mains AC power (computer, halogen desk lamp, DVD player, monitor, cable modem, DSL modem, cell phone charger, battery charger etc.) if the 'brick' or the device (if the AC/DC converter is internal) is powered up, it is using the same electricity for the 'pre-emptive' AC-DC conversion as it would if you were actually using the device. We religiously turned off all our power strips at night and when not in use and our electricity bill went down 50% over the first quarter and a further 50% once we were in the swing of it over the next quarter. The total was about a 75% reduction which we sustained over about 3 quarters.
We were amazed! We have since moved from LA back to the UK & we're applying the same techniques here. When still in the US I found a 'power strip' or 'trailing lead' as it's called on a UK website that 'auto detected' if a brick or device was on or off and switched the AC accordingly. My link now leads to a non-existent company! But I'm sure it still exists somewhere.
Best regards. Fool.
Fool, that's amazing! That's why I'm working to put power strips around all the big appliances in the house - although I had no idea it could yield that much of a reduction in energy use! I will step up my plan to buy powerstrips and see how it works for us.
We put our microwave oven, tv/dvd/satellite thingy on powerstrips. Since we rarely use the microwave and only for a few minutes at a time, it doesn't make sense to leave it on (and we have other clocks for the time).
So how did you do for the rest of 2008?
Heather G
(LJ: http://helwen.livejournal.com)
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