- Clearing Out
- The Great Purge of 2011
- Digital Noise
- Katie
- Purge and Purge Again
- Living Without
- Letting Go
- Energy vampires and the great time vampire
- Car-lite
- Sell or Give Away
- Toys, toys, toys
- By the numbers (or not)
- Post Purge Kitchen
- My new clothes dryer
- Project 333
- Project 333 Update – and expansion
- Decluttering 2012
You’ve probably heard of “energy vampires.” Things like your cell phone charger, some appliances that have clocks in them (microwave!), cordless gadgets like dustbusters. I’ve been very vigilant about making sure our cell phone charger is only plugged in when we’re using it and I turn off and unplug my power strip that handles all of my computer and computer-related cords. Yesterday I went around and found a few other energy vampires – a cordless vacuum, a cordless screwdriver, the power supply for my netbook. I unplugged them all and will use said items until they run out of juice and then plug them in to recharge them. Katie has a computer, but rarely uses it so that power strip has been unplugged for a while. If she wants to use her computer we’ll plug it back in for her. William’s computer happens to be the computer that is connected to our modem and Wifi router. I would like to turn his power strip off at night, but he goes to bed much earlier than I do so I’m a little stumped on that one.
A HUGE energy vampire and also the largest time vampire in our house is our TV/satellite box/DVR. I’ve read that these babies, due to the fact that they are always on, can actually use more electricity than an energy efficient refrigerator. Crazy! You can turn them off, but the satellite company sometimes sends “updates” in the middle of the night, the DVR records some stuff in the middle of the night, and it can take a while for it to power up completely (because it searches for updates).
Last night I turned off the power strip to all of our TV-related things (TV, Wii, satellite box/DVR, and DVD player). This morning I turned it back on and timed it to see how long it took to power up. And the answer is 10 minutes. Not bad! I think we can handle this. I also deleted a lot of the series I record out of habit. Seriously, I don’t need to watch every Cold Case there’s every been. A lot of the shows I record I use as “background” while I’m running around the house cleaning/reading/computering. I’ve been consciously choosing to not turn on the TV or play music just to enjoy a little silence and I think it’s made me more productive and less scattered.
So the TV-stuff power strip will officially be turned off every evening and not turned on until we want to actually watch something, not just have some background noise.
Saving money, saving electricity, and saving my sanity – cool.
