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posted by CoolHand on Friday May 08 2015, @04:29PM   Printer-friendly
from the giant-sucking-sound dept.

We've previously covered how standby mode in game consoles suck. Well, it seems like many devices across the US are sucking a whole lot of power--$19 Billion/yr worth. That is just the US estimation, it is not extrapolated out across the globe.

Approximately $19 billion worth of electricity, equal to the output of 50 large power plants, is devoured annually by U.S. household electronics, appliances, and other equipment when consumers are not actively using them, according to a ground breaking study released today by the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The report, "Home Idle Load: Devices Wasting Huge Amounts of Electricity When Not in Active Use," found most of the devices either plugged in or hard-wired into America's homes consume electricity around-the-clock, even when the owners are not using them or think they are turned off. The annual cost for this vampire energy drain, which provides little benefit to consumers, ranges from $165 per U.S. household on average to as high as $440 under some utilities' top-tier rates.

"One reason for such high idle energy levels is that many previously purely mechanical devices have gone digital: Appliances like washers, dryers, and fridges now have displays, electronic controls, and increasingly even Internet connectivity, for example," says Pierre Delforge, the report's author and NRDC's director of high-tech sector energy efficiency. "In many cases, they are using far more electricity than necessary."

 
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  • (Score: 2) by Zinho on Friday May 08 2015, @06:46PM

    by Zinho (759) on Friday May 08 2015, @06:46PM (#180419)

    Sounds like they put the meter on the wrong side of your main cutoff switch. I'm pretty sure that on my installation the meter is on the supply side of the cutoff breaker; it would be really odd if unloading the back side of that circuit cut off the meter from the street.

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