Run For One Planet Blog

By Chris Tilley

30 Plus Watts

The picture above is of the LED lights on the electronics in my living room. The picture is cooler if you click on it and view it full sized. Those lights represent over 30 watts of power that is on 24 hours a day 365 days a year. Depending where you live that will cost anywhere from $18 dollars to a high of $81 in Hawaii(source). The national average is $30. I can’t get behind my entertainment unit to test those devices so I had to find roughly equivalent devices. The rest were measured with a ‘Kill-A-Watt’ watt meter.

Lets take a closer look at those phantom loads. A number of them stood out my computer draws 10 watts when powered off. That works out to 87.6 KWh per year or between $6 and $27 a year, average $10. My Wii has the same issues there are three modes on the power button. On(green), Standby(orange) and off(red). To get to the off keep the button pressed until the light turns red. On it takes about 18 watts in the standby 10 watts and off it takes one. So In standby it takes the same as my computer does off. This appears to be because the USB ports are still active. We use rechargeable battery packs that plug into the USB port and recharge while in standby note. Interestingly they also charge plugged into my computer while it’s off.

Next were my cable modem and wireless router. The cable modem takes 6 watts or 52 KWh per year and cost between $3.68 and $16.50, average $6. The wireless router takes 5 watts or 43.8 KWh per year and costs between $3.07 and $13.75, average $5. I would like to put these on a power bar but one I’m not sure that they would come up right, normally you turn on the modem first wait and then turn on the router. I can’t experiment with this as my wife’s business has a server in the basement that need access 24/7.

Then there is my laser printer and a wireless print server that take 3 watts for the printer(idle) and 2 watts for the print server. That totals 5 watts or 43.8 KWh per year and costs between $3.07 and $13.75, average $5. This is on a power bar that only gets turned on when it is time to print.

The last one is cell phone chargers. When I first tested mine it read as 3 watts when actually charging and zero watts when not. This took me a while to figure out. The watt meter only reads to one watt, the cell phone charger takes roughly .46 of a watt. The watt meter has a KWh reading that measures over a time period so I could leave it plugged in and then divide that number by the number of hours that I left it plugged in. So over a year a cell phone charger would consume 4.38 KWh per year. That would cost between $0.31 and $1.38, average $0.50 per year. There are roughly 15 million cell phones in Canada so that would come out to 65,700 MWh.(source). In the USA there are 250 million cell phones those charger left plugged in would take 1.1 million MWh.(source)

There are two quick ways of looking for these phantom loads. First turn off all the lights and look for glowing LEDs. If it has an LED that is glowing even though the unit is off it is consuming power. The second is to put hand on items and see if they are warm, where there is heat there is power consumption.