Now is the time to get smart.
Smart about electricity usage, that is. For my recent birthday, I got an amazon.com gift card. What my friends unknowingly bought me with that gift card is a “smart” power strip. What’s a smart power strip, you ask?
Well, remember my posting on vampire power a few months ago? This is when you turn off devices and yet they still draw energy anyways waiting for you to turn them back on again. A list of the devices we have in our house and their energy usage shows many of them are vampires. A smart power strip combats vampires with the electrical equivalent of the wooden stake.
This is the Smart Strip LCG4 power strip that I got with my gift card.
Basically, there is one outlet on the strip that is the master. The other outlets are slaves. When the strip detects a significant voltage drop on the master outlet, it physically shuts down all electricity to the slave outlets. Then, when the voltage on the master resumes, it turns on the slaves again.
The upshot is that you can plug your computer into the master, and everything else into the slaves: the speakers, the monitors, the printers, the KVM switch, even the networking hub. When you put the computer in standby or hibernate mode, the usage (and voltage) drops, and all the other devices get turned off automatically. The computer of course still continues to use the standby energy (for mine, that is 4 watts), but the rest of the devices now use zero watts.
I plan to get another one for the entertainment center. Plug the TV into the master, and the stereo/amp, the DVD player, the external speakers, and the VCR into the slaves, et voila, I have avoided the vampire power on those devices as well.
Cost of the device with shipping: about $40.
Vampire power saved is:
Monitors: 2 watts
Speakers: 2 watts
Printer: 4 watts
Hub: 2 watts
KVM switch: 1 watt
Total: 11 watts
Time that the devices sit idle: 17 hours a day
Calculating out:
11 watts * 17 hours day idle = 187 Wh = 0.187 kWh
0.187 kWh * 365 days a year = 68.26 kWh a year
68.26 kWh * $0.22 /kWh = $15.02 a year saved
$40 cost of device / $15.02 savings a year = 2 years 8 months to pay for itself
68.26 kWh * 2.095 lbs of CO2 / kWh = 143 pounds of CO2 saved a year
Not big, but hey, it is more convenient than turning off a power strip manually, and therefore I save power (and the planet) without even trying.
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