How I saved 50% on my electric bill
Growing up we never had a lot of money and my dad (being a self taught electrical engineering type) was always on our backs about turning off lamps, television sets, etc when we weren't using them. So now as an adult I have certain frugal tendencies with regards to the home "electric bill".
I would always twinge at the thought that Tivo's hard drive never...ever...ever shuts down...even when we're sleeping and don't care about rewinding live tv. Even devices that are on standby mode suck out electricity. I ran a month long experiment at home to see what kind of savings we would have if we shut down all of the gadgets in our media center. Here's what I did:
(My gadgets in our media center: old sony tv, dvd player, wii, tivo (series 2), cable box, stereo)
- Run the surge protector into a remote control outlet like this one: tinyurl.com/55wyyv on amazon.
- Turn it off every night before heading to bed, or if we forget (20% of the time) I'll turn it off in the morning before I head off to work.
- That's it.
This past month our bill came in at $74 (the month before that was was $90 and before the expirement it ranged from: $180-$240) for a 1570 sq ft home. Oh and did I mention the wife and kids are home most of the day so they run the central a/c unit most of the day.
Next: I'm going to setup my office (cable modem, router, NAS, printer) next and I'll share my results.
Leave the results of your own experiment in the comments below.
(Additional reading:eetd.lbl.gov/EA/reports/40909/ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standby_power)
