Energy Adviser: Energy vampires lurking in dark places

It’s that time of year when we lock the doors, bolt the windows, and batten down the hatches to keep creepers away. Despite our best efforts, wattage goblins breach our defenses and slip into our homes every day. These hidden thieves pocket so little at a time that we hardly notice. But they devour our electricity steadily, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And that adds up.

In the past, there was a difference between “on” and “off.” But that era is gone. True, many of the appliances found in our homes today use energy more efficiently than they did a decade ago. Regrettably, they also come with the Catch-22 of standby power.

Today, we fill our homes with double-crossing devices inviting in watt gobblers. The average home holds between 30 and 40 of them. Your media center (TV, cable box and DVR) and your computer setup (cable modem, network connector, printer and computer) are among the biggest watt hobgoblins and can cost you between $40 and $50 a year.

But they belong to a long list of energy bandits that can include: smart lights, smart appliances, home automation technologies, televisions, coffee makers, water purifiers, furnaces, air conditioners, toasters, microwaves, game consoles, night lights, wireless phones, chargers of any kind (think tablets and cell phones — smart or dumb), and wireless and network hubs.

Each of these lets in energy pilfering phantoms.

These two-timers rob us under various aliases — vampire loads, phantom power, standby mode, sleep state, and electrical leakage. Call them what you will — they steal pennies from our pockets. And if not stopped, those pennies can pile up into a mountain of money. Experts say as much as 8 to 12 percent of our overall electric bills can go towards payoffs to these standby racketeers.

Worse, their ranks grow every year.

The International Energy Agency reports: “The rapid growth of connected devices comes with a hidden energy price tag … standby [power] is often a connected device’s biggest [energy] draw….” The agency worries unstopped energy pick-pocketing could grow 20 percent a year reaching 46 terawatt hours by 2025.

That’s a horrifying amount of wasted electricity and an amount we should take personally. So much squandered power adds to our personal carbon footprints and our utility expenses.

What can we do to slow this small but steady stream of wasted electrical power?

In a word, unplug. Unplug anything that’s not in use. Disconnecting watt-snatchers from the wall socket stops them cold.

But, sometimes, that’s inconvenient, or devices are a combination of things that require standby and those that don’t. No matter, there is a tool to help exorcize digital demons — smart power strips.

Smart strips plug into wall sockets and manage power to several devices. They allow you to plug in multiple devices designating one, the “master” that takes control over the others plugged into the strip.

The first step is to organize appliances in the house into groups. Then, assign one as the master, and you’re ready to deter power thievery. Whenever you shut off the master device, all the others on the strip turn off too.

Choose the best appliance as a master controller. For example, plug your computer into the master outlet, and plug printers, speakers, scanners, and monitors into the automatic outlets on the smart strip. Now you can shut down all your devices at once. Each time you turn off the computer you also shut down all the other devices. Next time you turn your computer on, the other items plugged into the smart strip wake up ready to go to work. The same set-up works well with a TV as the primary and accessories such as sound bars, game consoles and DVD players turning off automatically when the TV is off.

The energy vampires siphon only a trickle of energy, but it adds up. Ending the steady stream of waste can add up to big savings.