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In our technological world, more and more electrical devices are making their way into our household’s cordless phones, TV’s, DVR’s, security systems, automated coffee machines and much, much more. Just how much electricity are these things really using, even when they are supposedly turned “off”?

In the old days when you turned something off, it really turned off. There was no more electrical draw from the wall outlet. But in the new world, turning something “off” doesn’t really mean off. If you turn off your TV by pushing the power button on the remote control you are actually putting your TV into Standby Mode. If it were in fact really turned off such that no electricity flowed through the little internal components, how would the TV detect a signal from your remote control to turn the TV back on? It wouldn’t. Most TV’s as well as any other device that has a remote control is always using electricity if it’s plugged into a wall outlet. The electricity used by these devices is called standby power or vampire power because it sucks electricity without most people even knowing it.

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We live in the small town of Falcon, CO which is on the eastern outskirts of Colorado Springs. Behind us is hundreds of yards of open space that will never be developed which means we take the full brunt of the winter cold spells that barrel in from the north. We found that our gas furnace would run almost continuously during a winter storm and struggled to keep the house warm. During cold nights when there was no wind, the furnace would still fire up about once every 20 minutes and even though it ran for a much shorter time, over the course of the month, our heating bills were averaging about $175.

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