They creep into your home silently. You can't see them, you can't smell them, but phantoms are haunting your house. Every time you turn your back, they surge into your home with stealth and power. These phantoms, however, only have one way into your home - through your electrical outlets.
If you leave appliances plugged in when you're not using them, they're using phantom power, which is slowly racking up both your electricity bill and the carbon-dioxide emissions in Dane County.
Almost all appliances without a genuine off switch use phantom power, so although your lamps are in the clear, your TV and your computer could be serious culprits. But those have off switches, right? Wrong. Sort of.
There is a difference between standby (or sleep) mode and OFF. It's a luxury to sit down on the couch and curl up in a blanket with a pint of Ben & Jerry's (Half Baked is my favorite), grab the remote, turn the TV on and settle in for a movie night. Except, if the remote can turn the TV on, something is powering the remote-control sensor. So when the TV is off,"" it's using less energy than when it's on, but it's still using energy. To turn it ""off off,"" you have to unplug it.
Other types of appliances use phantom power, too. Think of your cell-phone charger. It's pretty cool that as soon as you hook the charger to the phone it starts charging. In other words, electricity flows continuously through the charger so it's always ready to supply your phone with power. And then, of course, there's anything that lights up: your microwave, your digital alarm clock, your light-sensor nightlight (if you're afraid of the dark, like me).
So the other day I looked around my house at all the appliances I have. I'm too cheap to buy a TV or cable, but I have three lamps, my laptop, a printer, an air cleaner, my sound system, two nightlights (afraid of the dark, remember), a toaster oven, a microwave, an alarm clock, a cell phone, a refrigerator and a stove/oven. I started to wonder just how much phantom power these appliances use.
Madison Gas & Electric charges $0.12 per kilowatt-hour for residential electrical service. Most appliances use between zero and five watts of standby power. Five watts is only 0.005 kilowatts, but multiplied by the 11 appliances that I own multiplied by the 24 hours a day they run - I don't need to do the math to know that cutting my standby power use will save me money. It may not be a lot of money for, say, Bill Gates, but just $0.10 is a lot on my measly college-student budget.
Financial savings aren't the only reason you should reduce your phantom energy load. If you take the standby power that you and I and your neighbor and my neighbor and their neighbors all use, you've got global warming! Well, it's a contributing factor, at least. There are more than 200,000 homes in Dane County, according to U.S. Census 2007 estimates. Every kilowatt-hour of electricity releases 2.2 pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, according to Robert Stoffs, community services manager of MG&E. Obviously it is great to reduce carbon emissions simply by unplugging stuff at home, but reducing carbon emissions in your hometown makes it even better.
Whether cutting down on your phantom load is something you have to do for the preservation of your planet or your expense accounts, there are different ways to do it, so whichever way works for you, go for it. The most obvious method is the unplugging method. Great if your worst phantom-load offender is your cell-phone charger, not so great if your worst offender is your HD cable box plugged in behind your five-by-five foot (not to mention five-ton) entertainment center.
There's also the power strip method and the prevention method. Power strips with a switch make it easy to cut power to many appliances all at once. They even make ""smart"" power strips now, which recognize when a primary appliance is turned off and shut off other peripheral devices as well. Basically, if I shut off my CD player, the power strip will shut off my surround sound as well.
You can also limit the phantom load by buying EnergyStar appliances. Manufacturers must limit the phantom load in order to meet EnergyStar requirements for certification.
Although phantom power is not a major dent in your wallet now, that might change in the years to come. The energy industry is changing and moving toward wind and nuclear power, according to Willis Long of the Department of Engineering Professional Development at UW-Madison. That's all very expensive to build, he said.
Energy is costly, and it's projected to get more and more expensive. So phantom power might not be a big deal yet, but you might want to get in the habit of unplugging now, before pennies become dollars, before global warming becomes global warmed and before phantom power starts haunting you.
