An Explanation of what Vampire Load is in relationship to your home's power usage and how it can be avoided reducing your electric bill, requiring less power from solar when available and prolonging the duration of power from a home battery pack.
Episode #10-07 released on September 15, 2019
Years ago, actually over nine years ago I talked about a very specific issue that still plagues many to this day. And, that problem is the vampire load on your home electrical grid. Today, I will talk about the problem again and how you can, also, apply the solutions to homes with battery packs and solar panels.
You are aware that your fridge and freezer continuously draw a load from your electrical grid in your home. It is even fair to expect that those are the devices that will cost the most on your electrical bill. However, you cannot unplug them to save money, not if you don't want to lose all your food in the process.
Learning about all your other devices will help you save small amounts of money and maybe the accumulation of all your small savings will allow for a lot of savings. This, however, only works if you are ready to change some of your habits and use some specialized hardware to achieve a very specific set of goals.
Which devices are drawing power unnecessarily?
This depends on your definition, but the majority of new devices have a low power and power on mode. A true power off mode is getting more and more rare by the day with the advent of wireless access to devices and remotes being a thing. Anything that has a remote is still on, it just sits at a lower power state, but that means it is still drawing power. These things can be anything like sound systems, consoles, media players, printers, etc. Anything that can be accessed with voice controls is, also, likely on.
Is there a solution?
Yes, Any surge bar with a master outlet controlling select outlets will allow you to turn off unnecessary devices when they cannot be in use. An example may be the sound system whenever your television is not on. On you can have the consoles powered off whenever the television isn't on. You can have the printer turned off when your computer is on. And, there are many other possibilities, as well.
How much will you save?
That depends on how many devices you have power disabled and how long they remain in that state. The cost of the specialized surge bars or UPS devices, also, plays into the cost savings and the amount of time we calculate it on. But it comes down to this. Imagine that is a sound system sitting quietly using a single watt of power, only you have a dozen of this devices in your home. Now, imagine all those devices using no power whatsoever anymore over a period of 8-hours or even 16-hours. If you have a dozen devices using 1-watt per hour suddenly off for 16 hours, that is 192 watts of power not used up in a day. After a year, if you continued that trend, you would have saved over 70kWh of power. And, we are only presuming each device only draws a single watt per hour, some devices may use a lot more. The cost savings can be even more interesting after that. And, the power savings to your home battery pack can provide in an extension in power during blackouts or during the night when solar panels do not generate any power.
This method can be even more interesting for anyone using solar power as it means that you will need less sunlight and be able to use less power in the short and long term.
Host : Steve Smith | Music : | Editor : Steve Smith | Producer : Zed Axis Dot Net