Appliances Hog More Energy Than High-Tech Gadgets

Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "A tech columnist looked around his home and wondered, 'All these TVs and cable boxes and computers and computer gear and chargers for various adapters have to be sucking up a lot of power, right?' So WSJ.com's Jason Fry bought a power meter to find the biggest power hogs in his home. They weren't his newfangled gadgets: 'The heavily used agglomeration of PC / two monitors / printer / hard drive / speakers in my downstairs study costs a bit more than $10 a month. The PC in our bedroom costs about $6 a month. The upstairs laptop? Less than $1 — a bit more than other always-on gadgets such as the router, cable modem, wireless repeater and Airport Express. So what were our apartment's power hogs? The lights and the dryer. I estimate our lights cost us around $30 a month, nearly a third of that from a chandelier with eight bulbs. Then there's the dryer. I don't know exactly how many watts it uses, but estimate it's costing us at least $25 a month.'"

Comments

energy saving lightbulbs

[thelost]

a great reason to invest in energy saving lightbulbs i would think.

Re:Lights?

[afaik_ianal]

Heh - I love seeing a good, old fashioned smack down.

Re:Dual Use Tech

[cayenne8]

"the old man happened to be working on his dryer at the time. He finished, plugged it in, and BANG. "

I think this says it all right here don't you? Of course you are supposed to hire a professionally trained person to work with gas connections (unless you yourself are a trained person).

Lord, if you aren't an electrician, I guess you could easily fry yourself trying to re-wire a switch in the house or something else....

I guess what I'm trying to say here..working on things like this when you aren't qualified...anything could result in a very bad accident!!

When you have problems with appliances like this...you call a pro-repair guy...this isn't DIY stuff....not for most people.