Save Electric Bill on Your TV and Computer Peripherals

When it comes to saving energy and electric bill in a household, big items like washing machines, refrigerators and air conditioners usually come to our mind. These are appliances with some of the biggest consumption of electricity in a typical home. They are indeed good places to start looking for opportunities to make substantial energy savings.

Having said that, it is also important not to overlook the electrical consumption of various electronic items around the house. Many of these units may look small with few mechanical moving parts. Intuitively you may think that they can't possibly use that much electricity. However, this is not always true. In fact, using an electricity monitor, some folks found that their particular combination of TV and cable box actually used up more energy than their refrigerator. So seemingly small electronic equipments can spring surprises in terms of energy consumption. Furthermore, even if these electronic items individually are small users of electricity, their collective energy consumption adds up to a considerable amount because there is usually a fair number of them in a typical household.

So let us take a look at a television set and its peripherals and see what we can do to save money there. TV peripherals typically include things like cable box, DVD player, VCR player, game console etc. When these items are not being used, they usually are in some form of standby mode, drawing some power from the electrical circuit. This standby power is effectively wasted. It is estimated that standby power accounts for around 5% of electrical expenditure in a typical household.

Note that these peripheral equipments work in conjunction with the TV being switched on. It really makes no sense for them to be on when the TV is off. So wouldn't it be nice to have a device which will automatically cut off the power supply to these TV peripherals when the TV is turned off? This way the peripherals won't consume wasted standby power while doing nothing.

Fortunately such a device exists. A manufacturer has come up with a smart power strip that offers not only surge protection, but also auto-switching technology. Just like an ordinary power strip, it has multiple outlets. However, one of the outlets is a controlling outlet whereas most of the remaining outlets are controlled outlets. To set it up, you simply plug the main equipment, in this case the TV, into the controlling outlet. You then plug the peripherals into the controlled outlets. Now whenever you switch off the TV, the power strip detects the reduced current draw in the controlling outlet and cuts off the power supply to the controlled outlets, thereby switching the peripherals off.

This arrangement can be repeated with a computer and its peripherals. This time, you plug the computer into the controlling outlet and peripherals such as monitor, printer, scanner, speakers, modem etc into the controlled outlets. Now when you switch off the computer or put it on standby, the smart power strip switches off the computer peripherals.

You can see that a smart strip not only protects you from power surges, but also solves the problem of standby power wastage, saving you money and energy.