Yes that’s right – is your PC setup slowly sucking away at your electricity supply feeding from the power grid, digging its two fanged teeth deep into your wall outlet!

Hey, we’re talking here about standby power or vampire power as it has become known – the wasted residual power drawn from your residential electricity supply even when your PC is turned off.

Sure, standby power only accounts for maybe 5% of the total power consumed in the U.S. so we’re not talking a lot here and yes, many newer PC peripherals on the market now are designed to consume extremely small amounts of power when they are in standby mode.

So, standby power could be considered a problem only if you have a number of older higher consumption devices, but similarly, if you have an awful lot of consumer products around your home all sat sucking away on standby, well, it all adds up you know!

For instance did you know that in 2000 researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimated that America spent more than $4 billion on standby power and generating that electricity put 27 million tones of CO2 equivalent emissions into the atmosphere!

Electricity prices are rising and more and more people are becoming concerned about the effect we are having on our environment so maybe we should all be looking into ways to help the environment and at the same time help our pockets too.

PCs and their associated peripherals are major contenders for wasting power.

Add up all of your PC, printer, router monitor (maybe two or more) external hard drives, scanner etc – hey, that’s already quite a list we have here but when you consider that a lot of homes now have more than one of these setups per household you can surely see what an awful waste of power there could be and the possibilities for saving money should a way of turning all of this off simply was available to you.

Let’s look at this in a little detail shall we?

Maybe you have a PC that has a standby power of say 5W.

Your printer clocks in at say 3W of standby.

You have a couple of monitors at 4W a piece and a typical router at say 2W.

Ok, so we’re up at 18W total for this one setup – not much you say?

All this power is consumed during the hours your devices are in standby.

So, let’s see – 24 hours at 18W = 432 Watt/hours

Now, an average month has 30.44 days so we now have 13,150 Watt/hours or 13.15kWh at 15 = $1.97 month – not a lot but with three of these setups that’s $71 a year!

Ok, so if you want to get some real data for your devices then you can get hold of a cheap plug-in power monitor which simply plugs into your wall outlet and then you just plug-in the device that you wish to monitor. You could in fact plug-in a power strip containing your whole setup if you like.

The power monitor has an LCD display which gives you a reading telling you how many watts your device or setup is consuming and from this you can work out your actual running costs.

I think you’ll be pretty surprised at how much electricity you are using when your devices are actually on!

So, how do we tackle this problem in a way that is easy to implement and won’t impact upon your day to day usage?

Well to start with you could ensure that you have set up Windows power saving features so that your PC goes into standby after a preset period of inactivity.

If you have a NAS then look into whether there is a sleep mode feature whereby you could set it to power down overnight say.

It’s a start but switching your PC and devices off at the socket would be a much better option but not very practical and too much hassle for most PC owners.

Not to worry, there are a few other options here that will appeal to most people interested in saving a bit of money and helping the planet too.

So, firstly you could invest in a simple flip switch which plugs into your wall outlet and has an output for your device which is switched to allow you to remove power easily without having to remove the plug from your wall socket.

Alternatively, if you have several devices such as a monitor, printer PC DSL/Cable modem USB hub etc and you want to be able to switch them on and off individually then you can get a power strip which has individual switches for each output.

Have a look at the ‘Ultra ULT31570′ 7 outlet complete with surge and spike suppression and 6 individual switches.

Another option is the ‘Smart Power Strip Automatic Switching Surge Suppressor’.

Now this is the one that most people will be very interested in – featured on the ‘CBS Early Show’ and many others it really is the business!

You will never need to physically turn your computer peripherals on and off again!

The Smart power Strip actually senses how much power your PC uses and when it senses that you have turned off your PC it automatically removes power to your peripherals too thereby completely eliminating the consumption of wasted standby power!

Not only that, it incorporates surge protection, line noise filtering and 10 outlets!

‘Ultra’ offer a similar 8 outlet product, the ‘SP8′ which also incorporates coaxial / cable TV Ethernet and Phone surge protection.

I hope you can see that there are benefits to be had for both your family and the environment by taking a little time to look at adding in a simple power saving device that will help save on your monthly energy bill.

Colin Garden is a Hardware Electronics Design Engineer and has been involved in the electronics industry for over 20 years. He is also the owner of www.pc-tips-and-tricks.com which was created to help home PC owners build, maintain and network their own PCs.