Smart Energy Today

As you may remember from the post on our plans to reduce our electricity usage by 50%, one of our strategies was to eliminating phantom loads within our home.

First let me start by explaining what phantom loads are and how they have crept into our homes. A phantom load is the power that is consumed by any device that is either turned off or in standby mode. Right now you are probably thinking how can a device that has been turned off still be using power. Well look around your home at night and you will probably see lots of green and red glowing LEDs using up electricity. In addition to these LEDs are the devices that operate by remote control, they are always using up a little electricity in the circuitry that responds to the remotes signals. Basically any device or appliance that is left plugged in could by using small amounts of electricity even when they are off. These small amounts can add up to a lot of wasted electricity usage because of the number devices involved and the fact that they use electricity 24 hours a day.

Finding the Phantom Loads

As described in the last post, you can use your electric meter to determine the electric usage of the various phantom loads in your home. Here is the method that I used to find the worst phantom loads within my home:

First, I turned everything off including all lights, the refrigerator (don’t want it kicking on during the test), and all electronic devices. At this point I have not unplugged anything. I then timed the meter disc to determine our homes base electric load.

With the base electric load measured, I then unplugged devices and re-timed the meter disc to get the new electric load measurement. The device or devices load could then be determined by subtracting the new measurement from the base measurement. This took a little time an effort but I was able identify phantom loads that I could eliminate - computer system, entertainment center, and kitchen radio. Take a look at the following calculations I did to figure out how much we would save by eliminating these phantom loads.

Base Load Calculations
Disc Rotation Time: 267 seconds (161.8 Watts)
Daily Usage: 3.9 kwh
Monthly Usage: 116 kwh

Phantom Loads Unplugged Calculations
Note: Calculations based on using the device for 4 hours a day and unplugging it for 20 hours.
Disc Rotation Time: 490 seconds (88.2 Watts)
Phantom Load: 73.6 Watts
Daily Usage Savings: 1.47 kwh
Monthly Usage Savings: 44 kwh

Just by installing a couple of powerstrips we had laying around, we were able to reduce our monthly usage by an estimated 44 kwh. We are still using a base load of 88.2 watts which adds up to 63 kwh a month, so there is still some phantom loads that probably can be eliminated. But this is a good start.