How do phantom charges affect your electricity bill?  Is it worth worrying about?  Phantom charges occur when appliances use electricity when you are not using them.  Just going around the room that I am sitting in while writing this paper I can list several things that are using electricity and are not being directly used. 

The volume on the computer; has a light on right now, as well as the camera charger.  The iPod charger is lit up showing the time but we really don’t need a second clock in the same room and the hard drive is lit up and we don’t use this daily.  In the living room our surround sound has a power light and also the DVD player.  When we turn off the TV the DVR is still on.  In the kitchen I can say that the oven shows the time all night but the inconvenience of turning that off isn’t worth it.  There are several cell phone chargers plugged in right not charging phones.  As you can see we use a lot of electricity that we don’t need to. 

You can reduce your electricity bills by 10% simply by unplugging appliances or switching devices off at the power point they are connected to when not in use.   Even though you hit the power switch on your gadgets they still consume electricity.  The amount of usage of these appliances can be anything from .5 to 5 watts per hour; which may not seem like a lot but when you multiply by the number of hours a day and the number of households in the world this adds to a lot of carbon pollution.  Even though this week’s task is about “turning off lights” I would like Ben to focus on how much we are consuming in phantom charges.  If you have any tips on how to conserve, please write in the comments below.