‘Vampire’ devices bleeding us dry at night
Appliances left on ‘standby’ are draining out hundreds of euros in electricity costs
DID you know there are vampires lurking in plain sight all over your home? Those TV boxes, phone chargers and printers left on standby might look innocent, but if left on, these vampire devices drink pricey electricity just like the mythical fang-toothed ‘creatures of the night’ drink blood.
They are literally adding hundreds of euros to electric bills now heading for €2,000 a year on average.
The number of devices in the home has soared – and they’re usually found lurking in vampire packs around every socket in the house.
If left on all night, they can suck up nearly €300m worth of electricity every year – or as much as €300 per household.
‘We have almost 40% more electrical devices than we had previously in our lives and anything up to 65 devices,’ says Madeline Murray, CEO of the Change by Degrees sustainability consultancy.
‘We can save anything between 11% to 20% of our electricity bills if we’re more mindful of the equipment that we leave on standby in our homes.
‘They could suck out 23% of our energy usage’
‘With so much of us working from home there’s transfer of office equipment like a monitor printer laptop. A laptop could cost up to €71 a year,’ she told RTÉ’s Claire Byrne radio show.
‘In the US, $19bn a year is lost (via standby wastage), which is phenomenal amount of money… equal to 15 million cars.’
‘This is avoidable waste – energy we do not need to use.’
Proportional to our respective populations $19bn would be the equivalent of €286m in total, lost to Irish households through this phenomenon.
So why has it increased so much? There are as many reasons as there are extension leads and multiplesocket adapters tangled up in every corner of every room.
The number of devices we use has exploded. And while many are more energy efficient – some, like TVs, have got pretty enormous too, which more than counteracts that extra efficiency.
In addition to the proliferation and growth of the amount of devices, soaring electric prices have more than doubled the cost of leaving them lazily on standby, according to a spokeswoman for Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland.
A new survey this week, has eh, ‘upped the stakes’ in the vampire energy debate, showing that they could suck out up to 23% of our electrical usage.
While the results of these type of surveys tend to vary a lot, this would equate to well over €300 a year, at the current prices, if all devices were included.
But even with 13 popular devices, the total bill for leaving them on all of the time would come to a hefty €235 a year – a potential saving not to be sniffed at.
TV energy usage can vary greatly depending on size and age – and which survey you read.
Some surveys suggest they cost a tenner to run per year. But in this survey, they are the worst offender for standby costs.
The report by British Gas puts the cost at €40 per year. I’m not sure why this is so much more than many earlier surveys. Could it be something to do with the evolution of smart and extremely large televisions that now dominate our living rooms?
Next on this bloodsuckers’ role of shame is a set-top box from a provider such as Sky or Virgin Media at up to €37 per annum.
As both devices are usually plugged in together, you could be saving nearly €80 a year just by reaching down and switching off the plug at source.
Other devices that gobble up energy in standby mode include a microwave at €26, a games console at €19 and a computer €18.
Electric showers clocked in at €16, a washing machine at €8 and a printer at €6.
Standby costs of devices such as internet routers at €30 and smart speakers at €14 also add up – although there are good reasons to keep them on when they are not actively being used.
‘We recommend as general principal for everything that uses energy in the home is turn it off when it is not in use, and use it efficiently when it is on,’ says the SEAI spokeswoman.
Our homes use a quarter of all the
energy we consume in Ireland, next to our private cars which account for almost one fifth of our entire energy use.
‘Our collective actions in how we use energy in our homes and how we travel can make a big difference,’ she adds.
And the difference now is not only the disastrous effects on climate change, which was a compelling enough reason to use less electricity. Now Europe needs to wean itself off fossil fuels that feed the military might of Russia at a rate of nearly $1bn a day, threatening our energy – and actual – security. Ireland has bought Russian oil but not gas. However, every kilowatt of power we use helps to keep the price of high by increasing the demand on it.
And if it’s not going into Putin’s pocket, burning oil or gas is aiding his cause by keeping demand high and filling the coffers of another ‘petrodollar’ state, like Saudi Arabia or Iran, which don’t tend to be nicest regimes on the planet either.