Vampire Calculations

1351722302288

Since my challenge is a rather small, habitual change I have found it to be fairly difficult. When I wake up in the morning and unplug my phone from the charger I usually don’t instantly unplug the charger also. It is when I am in the process of getting ready or when I am about to walk out the door, that I realize there are things I need to unplug before I leave. I am hoping as this challenge continues that it will become more natural for me to unplug things while in the process of unplugging the things they charge or when I finish using them. While I will admit there are a few times I have forgotten to unplug things before leaving my room, I have in general made a pretty good improvement in eliminating some of the vampire power I used to allow.

After doing some research and seeing what this sort of small change can do for the environment, I have been able to find encouraging information that what I am doing is making a difference no matter how small. The website I found calculates annual energy costs based on your vampire power so I calculated what I thought to be my previous behavior verse my current, improved behavior. I calculated at a rate of 10 cents per kwh since that appears to be the average cost of power in Easton. Previously, keep in mind that I am a college student without that many things to plug in, my annual cost would have been $39.86. With the changes I have made for my challenge my current annual cost is now $29.78. This tells me that I have successfully cut out about 25% of the vampire power I used to consume.

This vampire calculator also showed me what things I can change to further decrease my annual kwh consumption. The remainder of my cost was coming from a plugged in TV and a plugged in DVD player. I think I could very easily unplug these devices, and this would greatly decrease my vampire power consumption. Unplugging these devices would make my challenge even more successful and and increase the potential sustainability implications of my behavior change. This site expressed that 5-10% of household energy costs come from vampire power, so if more people made changes like this they would find their energy costs to greatly decrease and we would see a noticable drop in energy consumption and carbon footprint.

http://www.green.harvard.edu/tools-resources/green-tip/eliminate-vampire-power

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *