We Never Did 1 Thing! So Here’s 1 Thing We All Can Do

We keep skipping 1 thing, now that we’re on our new publishing schedule. Our apologies. Here’s 1 thing we can suggest you do instead, a simple potentially money saving thing! As recommended by the Washington Post:

If your home has a smart meter, here’s an experiment: Log in to your power company’s Web site, and see how much electricity you use during the hour from 3 to 4 a.m. daily.

You were asleep (we hope), and surely nothing major was running. Maybe the heat (but it’s best to set the thermostat down at night). And the fridge — but if it’s a newer one, it’s probably very energy efficient.

And yet nonetheless, you’ll likely find a significant amount of power being gobbled up. “You can start spotting a time, depending on the home, where you can just see the minimum power consumption, and it’s really surprising how much gets consumed during that period,” says Alan Meier, an expert on energy technologies at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who recommends the 3 a.m. strategy.

I’ll recommend anything if you call it “the 3 a.m. strategy.” That’s just good marketing.

The problem is not any one device — it’s all of them in combination. “A typical American home has forty products constantly drawing power,” says Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Web site Standby Power.

Examples range from your modem to your cable box, your microwave with its clock always lit up, and your LED lights which you can control from your phone — which always have to be able to receive a communication from you.

Naturally, all this vampirism is expensive.

According to a recent paper in the journal Energy Research and Social Science, devices in standby mode alone consume 4 to 12 percent of the total power used by a home. With a national average monthly electricity bill of $ 107.28 (in 2012), the average cost might be roughly $4 to $13 per month, or between $48 and $156 per year.

A 2008 study put the number much higher for all kinds of miscellaneous electrical load — as high as 27 percent of home electricity use — and concluded that in 2006, this accounted for 10 percent of U.S. electricity use overall.

We used to be good at this, when Ben and I lived in a 250-square-foot studio. Our electronics were plugged into surge protectors and before we went to bed we would kick the little red switch and voila! Everything went to sleep along with us. Now that we have more rooms, it’s easier to forget.

But if you reject this 1 thing, what 1 thing did you / do you plan to do instead? My actual one involves making boring, annoying calls to various pediatrician-y bureaucracies. HEALTH CARE. Always the funnest 1 thing.

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