Vampires in the Office

According to a new Salon.com article, chances are that your nonprofit office is filled with vampire appliances, plugged-in electronic equipment and chargers that continue to consume electricity even when they're turned off, adding to your electric bill and spewing CO2 into the air:

On average, that's the equivalent of one month's electricity bill. Taken across the United States, this adds up to at least 68 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity annually; that's the equivalent output of 37 typical electricity-generating power plants, costing consumers more than $7 billion. This wasted energy sends more than 97 billion pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere; on a global scale, standby energy accounts for 1 percent of the world's carbon emissions, according to Alan Meier of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, based in California.

However, before you dig out that garlic and cross, the article proposes, consider these 21st-century remedies:

• Smart Strip
  "By monitoring power consumption, the strip detects when computers or stereos are off and powers down, eliminating energy usage in all peripheral devices such as printers."
• Isolé Power Strip
  "Uses a motion sensor to turn off six of its eight outlets if it hasn't detected anyone in the room for up to 30 minutes."
• Kill a Watt Power Meter
  Unsure which appliances are vampires? This "nifty gadget with a wall outlet ... measures the watts, volts, amps and kilowatt-hours of a given device when off or on."
• Federal Energy Management Program Web Site
  "Supplies information about the standby power wattage of office equipment such as computers, fax machines and printers."
• Energy Detective
  "By providing immediate feedback of how much money you are spending each day on energy, and how much you are likely to spend next month, it's a solid motivator to unplug appliances and turn off lights."

The article also recommends reducing TV and computer monitor brightness by 30 percent, and to stop using screen savers, which it says can consume up to $100 a year.

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