wow …
here’s mine (HH with 5 persons, me work from home)
yep, the quick’n’easy test is touching that “wall-wart et al” … is it warm to the touch (while not in use), than unplug it, as it is consuming/wasting “enough” energy to make unplugging worthwhile. If not → pretty much only milliwatt-consumption
edit to add to the above graph: We do not have/need electric A/C and heating
The only thing I regularly unplug when not in use is my toaster, after reading about toaster fires. As well as considering the fact that it’s a device whose job is to “get hot” that sits right out on the countertop and often ends up with flammable things next to it.
Nonsense.
if it’s warm but isn’t glowing hot enough to burn you instantly the consumption is a dollar a year. Tops.
The correct sensible message is that wall warts do not matter, At all. What matters is the insulation in your residence walls and ceiling, the climate you live in, and your thermostat setting. And how much you wash clothes and towels unnecessarily or in hotter water than necessary.
Wall warts aren’t even a rounding error in that other consumption.
I (somewhat) agree that wall warts are not your first like of attack if you want to lower your bill … but then again, you don’t take a 5 dollar bill out of your wallet and throw it on the stree, once a year (that’s my way of seeing it)…
what makes about 30% of my electric-bill is: fridge/freezer … (no AC in our house and our washer uses tap-hot water) … so that is not a trivial thing, especially if I hear from my ‘merican friends about “running our old fridge in the hot garage to keep the beer cold ” …
there is no real reason to run an OLD fridge as a secondary device … buy a new one, it will pay in 2-3 years max.
Fourier analysis and so forth, I guess. Data analysis is getting interestingly good these days.
I am reminded of the music analysers which deconstruct a mix into separate instrumental stems: not perfect, but getting surprisingly close. Even 10 years ago most engineers would probably have thought that to be an almost impossibly difficult task….
I probably do lose $5 of something that i don’t bother to look for every year.
Anyway, i have a lot of kitchen appliances that get unplugged between uses, mostly because they share the same convenient outlet, or get put away out of reach of the outlet. I’m pretty sure that most kitchen appliances with an on/off switch use zero power when off. Maybe new ones pull power? My ancient mixer doesn’t, I’m pretty certain of that.
When i think of it, i unplug the laptops if we have a big thunderstorm. This is because i once had the internal modem of a laptop burn out when lightning struck near us. And i turn off lights when i leave an area, but that’s mostly habit. With a couple of exceptions (I’m running 60 watts of LEDs in the basement when the main lights are fully on) my lighting costs are totally negligible. That’s about all i do by way of unplugging.
(All my big energy hogs are gas. I suppose the two fridges and my pandemic freezer pull significant electricity, but they are all fairly new, fairly efficient, and really useful to have around. Oh, and the summer AC, of course. That’s on a thermostat, i only turn it “off” in the winter to discourage chipmunks from nesting in the external unit.)
I’m not sure if they still do this. But back in the day, law enforcement agencies would ask utility companies to analyze power usage of homes & businesses to look for the telltale signatures of grow lights used for growing marijuana.
Do you know how accurate this actually can be, these days?
I’ve worked on and off in the energy industry, and have come across several of these devices, both as a reseller and as a manufacturer (though in a different department). In my experience they were always kinda hit-or-miss and never as good as an actual device-specific meter, especially for smaller loads. But that was years and years ago. Is it better these days?
Unfortunately the state of science education means that the innumeracy is widespread.
For example, I suspect my wife has little or no knowledge of how much power each appliance in our house uses. And she was a geography major, which is at least a semi-quantitative discipline…
Well, it’s not very intuitive, and it also varies a lot not just between different kinds of appliances, but also different brands & models & years of the same kind of appliance.
One household could use more power playing a video game for a few hours than leaving a light bulb on for a month straight. That could be reversed for another household, depending on both the gaming device and the kind of light bulb.
And efficiencies have changed a lot over time. The energy usage difference between an old, large window AC without a thermostat and a smaller, modern variable-speed inverter one could be 10x or more. Fridges and laundry machines and dishwashers have similarly gotten more efficient. Heat pumps are better than resistive electric heaters.
But none of that would be obvious from the outside. You might never know unless you’re the sort of person who pays attention to Energy Star. And the newer devices have various drawbacks, so upgrades usually come with tradeoffs.
For the most part we think of our modern appliances as “push a button and it does its thing”, and the bill for that usage doesn’t come until a month later, as one tiny part of some confusing numbers and graphs. It’s hardly surprising that people don’t really understand how to measure their power usage — hence the “you’re using more/less than your neighbors!” letters.
I have one of those Kill-a-watt thingies, and run pretty much any new device through it for some time … gives you a good feeling if a device comes onto my “mental list” of things go make sure they are OFF.
here is a graph of the consumption of my fridge for the past 12 months … (note that I am in the southern hemisphere, and hence the fridge’s consumption goes down in may/jun/jul/aug/… (cold months))
So I get anything from 12 to 35+ kw/h of consumption per month … depending room temperatures
nifty device … always happy to geek out… 
The Playstation 2 and 3. They are very rarely used, and when plugged in they (or their power supplies) stay annoyingly warm. These are both ancient devices from the bad old days of vampires. Fortunately, I have an even more ancient power strip, designed to sit under a CRT monitor, that has switches for each outlet on the front, so I can “unplug” the PS2 and PS3 without having to crawl behind the entertainment center.
This phrasing comes from research that found people are more responsive when they’re compared to their neighbors. I don’t know if that research finding has been replicated, but I find it very annoying. It also completely backfires when they tell me I’m using the same power as my most efficient neighbors. Why bother to change anything in that case?
My brother has the opposite problem. He wanted to install a timer switch on his porch light, but he turned off all breakers, and his porch light was still on. Finally found out that it had been a plan to avoid installing street lights. The porch lights and occasional yard post lights bypassed each home’s power meter, so they could be left on all the time and not cost the home owner anything (except bulbs).
It really depends. Very, very roughly, it costs me $1/year/watt. So the PS2 and PS3 combined when off use 5-8 watts. So it would cost me about $5/year to leave them plugged in (plus the cost to remove that waste heat from the house in the summer). Not a big deal at all if they were used frequently, but the PS2 is probably never used in a year, and I’d rather spend the money on a happy hour pint than keeping a 25 year old power supply energized.
I have encountered devices, typically the evil that are printers, where their idle and power save mode is in the 20 watt range.
Main energy saving rule in our house is that if you leave the back door open for the dog, then the heat/AC needs to be off. That is fine during the temperate parts of the year. If you’re uncomfortable and want to turn on the heat/AC, then you need to open and close the door for the dog.
What?! I didn’t think it was possible to not be told one is an energy pig. I’m in awe! LOL
Here’s a better explanation of how they do it.
How does my bill itemization work?
Appliance Itemization is powered by disaggregation…a process that takes the energy usage data from your meter and uses software algorithm to identify the individual appliances that are actually using the energy.
How does it work? Magic?
Not really! Each appliance uses electricity in a unique manner - think of it like an appliance fingerprint. We detect and extract these “fingerprints” and convert the data into useful insights and recommendations.
The biggest energy users in our house are the dryer, washing machine and dishwasher, but they are off when not in use.
The fridge is on all the time, and in the winter, the central heating will come on on cold nights. We do leave things like the TV and WiFi running but the drain is minimal.
I can log on to my energy supplier’s website and see a detailed history og my gas and electric consumption. I can look at an hour-by-hour bar chart for yesterday, the month or the year to date and compare them with previous days, months or years. This is very useful.
Indeed, if you’re one of the efficient ones, you don’t need to change. And they’re telling you that.
Our laptops are plugged in at all times (except when we go away), likewise all the wall thingies (which are apparently called wallwarts–who knew). There are just a few things I actually unplug when not in use. The main one is the coffee grinder. I put beans in it every morning, plug it in, grind, pull the plug, empty it into the filter cone. There are also a knife grinder and a mini-Cusinart that use the same socket, so they are unplugged when not in use. Finally there is the charger for my electric toothbrush. I used to keep it plugged in constantly until I realized it was warm to the touch, so now I recharge a couple times a week.