Although you may not realize it, your house is haunted. As you sleep, when you’re awake, and while you’re out, these sparky spirits have the run of the house whether it’s a full moon or not. Phantom power is a phenomenon most of us passively permit. It is a plague of sorts that consumes electricity with your tacit permission, while draining your wallet and polluting the atmosphere in the process. We think the appliance we just turned off is really off but these ‘Phantoms’, or ‘power vampires’ disguise their wasteful ways as useful digital clock displays, handy gadget chargers, and shiny status lights around your house.

The true damage is that these culprits feed off of your electricity without offering any benefit to you in return. And the phantom load is persistent, draining away electricity every second of every hour, every hour of everyday, everyday of the year! The good news is that remedies are simple, readily available, and affordable or free to implement. So let’s start our adventure to ferret out the phantom!

In order to see the phantom we’ll need to measure the power used by the appliances we’ll be checking out. This is measured in Watts (W, and 1000 Watts is equal to one kiloWatt or a “kW”) - the same rating used for light bulbs. The more Watts used, the more electricity or Watt hours will be used over the course of time.

A Watt meter comes in a variety of price ranges and a general google search for them will turn up various meters ranging in price from USD$30 upward. A local hardware store flyer was advertising a Watt meter for CDN$19.49. For this article I borrowed a buddy’s meter to measure the phantom loads; it is a Pacific Science & Technology, Inc. “Line Logger.”

Now let’s look for the phantoms. I made a list of all the appliances in the house that I thought might use electricity while turned off. Typically, we’ll need to look for fixtures that appear to always be plugged into the electrical wall outlet. To measure the loads I went to each connected plug in and used the Watt meter to determine if a phantom load was present. Where applicable I tested the appliance load in various modes operation: on, off and standby (typically on the computer and computer monitor). The results below are taken with the appliance turned off or unless otherwise noted.

*These devices were not measured. Numbers are estimates

I then sorted the loads into ones I could live with being off when not in use and those that were needed on all the time such as the alarm clocks.

Now that you know where they are, it’s relatively easy and inexpensive to eliminate your phantom loads by simply plugging them into power bars that can be turned off when the appliance is not in use. You’ll need to buy the bars if you don’t already have them. A multiplug power bar is available in most stores varying in price from CDN$2.97 (Staples) for a four plug surge protection power bar on up for more sophisticated packages. The surge protection power bar is designed to protect your electrical equipment from getting a surge of power due to electrical strikes on the power grid system. All that is left to do is to make sure to use the bar to ensure the phantom loads disappear.

So what have we done? If you’re using the power bars properly you’ve now eliminated your phantom loads and reduced your energy consumption in the household. You’ve saved money, and also reduced the amount of greenhouse gas emissions that were linked to the production of that electricity from power plants.

Roughly 111 Watts of my phantom load total of 133 could be turned off when not in use! In Alberta, the 111 Watts I eliminated from my phantom load profile add up to 972 kWhours/year (kWh/y).(1) At a cost of roughly 6 cents per kWh, this would amount to CDN$58.34/ year in electricity charges. In addition to this, the amount of greenhouse gasses added to the atmosphere in Alberta would be reduced by roughly 898 kilograms/year (2) not to mention the streams of other emissions produced by the electrical power plants.

To get rid of phantom loads we need to ensure there is no power getting to the appliance when it is turned off. The use of the power bar with the on-off switch is the easiest way to ensure this can be done. But the bar itself will not do the trick. We all need to use our fingers or toes to flick the switch and control the phantom. Have fun with it and enjoy the savings and cleaner air!

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Footnotes:
1. 111 Watts x 24 hours/day x 365 days/year = 972,360 Watthour/year or 972 kWh/year.
2. In Alberta for 2004 the GHG gas production rate was 0.924 kg CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent)/1kWh of electricity production: Canadian Standards Association, Climate Change, GHG Registries, “http://www.ghgregistries.ca/emission_estimation_resources_e.cfm”

© Gary Woloshyniuk 2007

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