We bought this little metering gadget for work a couple of months ago that gives you a live readout of the wattage of a given appliance, records usage, etc. and I took it home as I've been sorta frustrated that in spite of being - I thought - pretty conscientious in my usage, I still seemed to be beasting my way through the kWhs.
I found a couple of interesting things. For instance, the two Nokia chargers and Vaio laptop charger that I've been religious about switching off at the plug when not in use, all plugged into the meter, register as 0 watts - so realistically, they're drawing ~0.3 watts each at the most when not in use.
I also found my hi-fi system registered a zero when in standby mode. I also confirmed what I'd often thought must be the case, counter-intuitive as it might be - that a given output level from the speakers consumes the same amount of power as if I crank it to the max and turn the source down to compensate. Nonetheless, while switched on, the amp draws a minimum 25 watts even if it's turned right down. (But it can kick out a fair volume at around 25 watts, so is it getting warmer when it has no work to do? It must be going somewhere.)
My iMac consumes 2 watts when sleeping, which is fairly decent I think. The external DVD writer however - switched on but doing nothing, still consumes 5 watts.
The biggest facepalm was when I metered the laser printer. Bear in mind I've had it plugged in solidly for about three years now - it draws an average of 85 watts while it's in 'ready to print' mode, just keeping itself warmed up for the ten or eleven A4 pages I've actually printed in all that time. £8.57 a month that's been costing - gutting, and it should have been so bleeding obvious. But because all the lights go out, you think it's in energy saving mode, stroking puppies and saving kittens. By comparison, if I have five cups of tea a day, that still only comes to £2.24 a month.
What a fallacy to believe that a couple of LEDs going out means that it's stopped using as much energy - just as the red standby light on a hi-fi makes us think it's guzzling energy. Giving my hi-fi a nominal half a watt, it's still only five pence a month - but less than that even, because some of the time it's actually being used.
So overall, fairly sobering to realise that the savings I've made in not using the heating (almost literally - has only been on once so far this winter, back in November) have been wiped out by the beige Brother monstrosity by the computer.
Definitely recommend getting (or better yet, borrowing) one of these.
