Residential Electricity Use Explained

In order to get a better handle on my electricity usage, I decided to examine just what in my home was contributing to my monthly electricity usage. This is important because we can't make good decisions about how to reduce our electric usage (and its associated carbon footprint for the environmentally concerned types) and pay less money unless we know where our power is going.

I nabbed data about the average monthly power use of various electronics. Then I took the list and found as many things on the list that I had in my home. The list I compiled was scary accurate. When I added everything up it pretty much matched my average power bill for kilowatt hours used. I found this to be a very useful exercise and encourage anyone reading this to do it for themselves.

The estimation for air conditioning on the list was way too low so when I did my calculations I bumped it up so it would be more reflective of reality. I don't really know why my air conditioner is so much higher than average. I may just use more air conditioning than average or my wall unit may be terribly inefficient. Maybe both.

Here's a summary that represents my summer electricity usage:
Air conditioning - 69%
Refriderator - 14%
Computers - 7%
Lighting - 5%
Microwave -2%
Coffee maker - 2%
Clock radio - 1%
Everything else - less than 1%

It's pretty obvious. The air conditioner is the #1 power consumer. Followed by the refrigerator, then computers and lighting. Based on this information I know the biggest targets to go after should I decide to make an effort to reduce my power consumption.

If you want to calculate how much power one of your appliances uses it's pretty easy. Follow these steps.
1. First, figure out the wattage of the device in question.
2. Then approximate how long you have it running during a given month.
3. Multiply these to get the watts per hour your device uses.
4. Then divide by 1000 to get the kilowatt-hours (kWh) used per month.
5. Multiply the kWh by the going rate for electricity and you'll know how much it's costing you per month.

Vampire appliances, much ado about nothing
I've been hearing a lot of bellyaching about so-called vampire appliances recently. Vampire refers to appliances that when turned off are not actually off, but rather in standby mode and therefore still using power. I've got friends who insist that they are saving big money by unplugging everything. Then when they run out of stuff to unplug, they start annoying me to unplug stuff.

So, fine! I decided to do some research. I pulled a list of vampire appliances. What I found was surprising. If you have everything on that list plugged in it'll cost you about $5 a month. All that meticulous plugging and unplugging will save you a whopping $60 a year and only if you have everything on that list. If you're hurting for money maybe (or obsessed with reducing your carbon footprint) you could try this out. But if you ask me, it's a waste of time. If I spent the same amount of time working as I would messing with plugs I could probably pull in more than $60.

But what was really surprising was the digital cable box. $2.10 a month! That's over 33% of the vampire power use. If you don't have a digital cable box, your vampire power expenditures drop to about $3 a month or $36 a year. Since I don't have a digital cable box, that's even less incentive for me to waste time fiddling with plugs.

Back to that digital cable box. It really grates on me that those things are that horribly energy inefficient. Then again, think about it. Even though you use a digital cable box, they are usually bought by and owned by the cable company. If you were a cable company, why would you waste money paying for energy efficient when you aren't going to be using it?

References:
http://www.savebuylive.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/vampire-appliances.png
http://www.savebuylive.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/residential-electric-power-use.pdf