How Many Vampires Are You Feeding In Your Home?

From Lestat to Angel, to the Twilight and Moonlight crews, it hasn't been hard to find vampires in pop culture - especially at this time of year. But while they may be fascinating on the tube or in print, slurping down lifeblood isn't exactly an endearing habit for a real-life connection.

Nevertheless, I'd make a bet that you have at least one vampire, and probably closer to a dozen, in your own home!

No, I'm not harboring Buffy fantasies...and the vampires I'm talking about aren't after your corpuscles. At this very moment they're plugged in and consuming your home's lifeblood - the electricity you pay for every month.

It's (appropriately) called "phantom energy loss" - just as silent and insidious as the legendary visitor who comes to sip while you sleep. And while you may not waste away as a result, your bank balance will show the drain.

So how do you recognize them? While hunting two-legged vampires at night is never a good idea, this is actually the best way to find your home's resident energy-suckers. Turn off your lamps, walk through your house, and count the little lights...

• your cell phone and iPod chargers...
• your computer and peripherals - modem, router, printer, backup drives, speakers, webcam, etc...
• your microwave, programmable coffeepot, and answering machine...
  
• your TV, Nintendo, PlayStation, WII...
• the chargers for your electric toothbrush and shaver...

They're everywhere! In fact, these energy vampires are costing you 5% or more of your yearly electricity bill. And 40% of that energy is wasted - the vampires are still pulling watts when the items they power are turned off or disconnected from their chargers.

How many watts are they pulling? It's easy to find out by using a Kill-A-Watt diagnostic tool, which measures the energy that enters a gadget over an hour, day, month, and year, along with the dollars it costs you. You can even run comparisons of energy used when the item is turned "off" versus "on".

So you might discover, for example, that your computer uses 200 watts when it's running, and still slurps down 35 watts when it's powered down.

Fortunately, you don't need a stake or a silver bullet to slay your home's energy vampires...and it's really more a question of taming than slaying, anyway. You need to make sure the energy they consume is used only to power your electronics at the time they're needed.

So how do you stop the energy hemorrhage? Begin with the familiar surge protector, which allows you to completely stop the energy flowing to your electronics after you've turned them off.

But what do you do when you need to have your computer running all night for critical backups or downloads, without powering your printer, monitor, etc.? Simple: an energy-saving power strip lets you plug in your peripherals into a block of six outlets controlled by the master switch, while your server plugs into an adjoining outlet that does not cut off.

When you stop for the day, turn off your peripherals and flip the master switch. You'll cut off your phantom energy loss while your nighttime processes continue undisturbed.

Don't be a victim to the energy vampires you've brought into your home. You can give them the energy they need to do their job, and no more.