Kill your phantoms.
"When they're not on, they're still using electricity," author David de Rothschild writes of our household appliances. "It's known as phantom electricity.... The phantom electrical load in the industrialized countries alone accounts for 75 million tons of CO2 emitted and billions of dollars wasted per year."
Do all you can to rid your home of costly, energy-sucking phantom electricity by:
- Plugging your electronics into power strips. With one flip of the switch, you can turn off your TV, VCR, Tivo and stereo ... or your computer, monitor, printer and fax.
- Unplugging your cell phone charger when not in use, as they use a shocking 95% more energy than necessary to actually charge your phone!
- Buying Energy Star appliances, through which phantoms can only suck half the energy of non-Energy Star appliances.
"If one million households halved their phantom power load," adds de Rothschild, "we'd eliminate 150,000 tons of CO2 per year."
1 comment:
We're well into the habit now of keeping the coffee pot, blender and other appliances unplugged when not in use (except for the microwave). We really need to work on the cell phone chargers though, as we'd grown accustomed to keeping them plugged in all night -- much longer than necessary to charge them. But remembering to turn off our computers seems to be the biggest challenge, primarily because we work from home and we're on-and-off them all day (and somtimes night) long. It's time to get tougher with our phantoms!
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