Action one – say no to small red lights on your TV.

This is a stunning statistic – if every house in New Zealand turned their appliances off standby, it’d stop about the same amount of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions going in to the air as if over 73,000 Aucklanders decided not to drive for a year. We all flick switches at the wall, and hey presto, we’ve just taken 73,000 cars off the road.

That’s a massive impact!

I’ve gone into more detail in the response to the comment above. But I was shocked especially to find out about power adapters… I had suspected they drew some energy, but the full load, wow! I’ll be making extra sure they are unplugged now… in fact I unplugged my adapters for my external hard drives that I only use occasionally as soon as I found out. I’ll also be sure to turn the power strip off that my wireless internet box and router plug into every night. I often stay up late then turn my computer off when I go to bed, but leave the router and stuff on because it’s in the lounge, and I don’t want to disturb the dogs and make the trip out there. But I’m going to make the effort to start doing it starting tonight!

Using power management features on your computer can save more than 600 KWh of electricity and more than $60 a year in energy costs. That equates to nearly half a ton of CO2, more than lowering your home thermostat by two degrees Fahrenheit in the winter or replacing six standard light bulbs with compact fluorescents.

Check out their site, they have some really good advice and instructions on how to set your computers up to take advantage of sleep mode under various operating systems.On your desktop computer, turning off AND unplugging the monitor is also going to save you. The monitors draw a large amount of power, even when they are in sleep mode. But by far the best is to turn them off and actually unplug them. The easy way to do this is exactly what Lorelei explains above, by using a power strip, then you just have the one power strip to unplug or turn off. Any time you see an LED on an appliance, it’s drawing power, and it may not seem like much, but it ads up to this shocking fact:

By 2010, according to the Department of Energy, 20% of each American’s electricity bill will come from appliances on standby.

I also happened to find some information while researching this site about leaving adapters plugged in. If you have your adapters plugged in, even when you don’t have the appliance attached they not only draw power when the appliance isn’t attached, but they draw the FULL POWER, because they don’t have an off switch, if they are plugged in they are drawing power. So if you have your cellphone charger plugged in the outlet all the time, your power adapter for your playstation or xbox, or for your external hard drives or modem, you’re drawing the full power load!

We watched Oprah one day and she had a lady on who not only shut down but unplugged her major appliances and said it really was reducing her hydro bill.

So we’ve started doing that too – the computer, tv and other things that we had plugged in and didn’t even use.

It’s hard to say for sure how much of a difference it is making in our bill because we fluctuate a bit by season, but I think that it has made some.

Thanks for a great reminder on a common issue that is good for the environment and our wallet!

Now I’m turning it off again, because I’ve heard tv commercials urging us to turn off all electrical appliances when not in use. It isn’t that hard to boot up, and lately my computers are frying the hard drive before the start button can break.

What is inconvenient, though, is turning off the tv and accessories. I have everything plugged into a power strip, so it’s just a one-step unplug, but all the dates and times are lost on the VCR and DVD then. Annoying, to reset it every day. Anyone have a good suggestion for that?

Thanks!