8 weeks of clean living

I put my Kill A Watt to use in order to find out how much electricity my home entertainment devices were drawing while idle. To measure them all at once, I connected them all to a power strip, then connected the power strip to the Kill A Watt. I have four devices (pictured below) that continually draw power in an idle state: a Samsung 32 inch LCD television, a Nintendo Wii, a Sony PlayStation 2 and a cable box/DVR. Over the course of 15.3 hours of testing (during which the devices were not turned on) these devices used .34 kWh of electricity. By my calculations this equates to approximately 195 kWh of electricity use per year. On a monthly basis, I use approximately 270 kWh of electricity, which means that almost 1 month’s worth of electricity is used up every year simply by leaving my electronics on idle.

One easy way to cut down on idle power consumption is to connect all of one’s home entertainment electronics to a single power strip which can easily be turned on and off. I use an APC power strip similar to this one. If I ever leave for a couple days, or otherwise know that I am not going to use my TV, I can just flick the power strip off and save a little energy. One cool feature of my power strip is that it includes “always on” plugs. These plugs continue to operate even if the power strip is switched off. I have my DVR attached to one of these ports so that I don’t miss taping a show just because I’ve shut off power to my other electronics.

I’m continuing this investigation by leaving my power strip plugged into the Kill A Watt for a couple of days under normal use. In this way, I hope to gain some insight into the hidden cost of entertaining myself with TV and video games.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 15th, 2007 at 7:26 pm and is filed under Energy, Entertainment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.