It took me years to discover that our big pool pump accounted for nearly a third of our electric bill. But once I understood this it only took a few months to fix—by switching to a variable speed pump. Excited by the easy win, I wondered what other energy hogs we had, because our bills still seemed high.

Back then we had an old electric meter with the “spinning dial”, and that pool pump revelation came with the insight that faster spins means higher bills. So when different appliances were running, I could go look at the meter and get a sense for how much electricity they used. Old pool pump? Fast spins! Oven on broil? Fast spins! Dishwasher or clothes washer? Not as fast.
But hold on! Even when none of our appliances were turned on, that dial was still spinning… not too fast, but steady: at night, with the kids sound asleep and most of the lights off… spinning; during the day when no one was home… spinning; leaving for a week’s vacation… spinning! We could hear our two refrigerators’ compressors when they came on once an hour or so, and I knew it wasn’t them.

This evil type of electric use has a number of names: vampire, phantom, idle, continuous, base… but the concept is simple: it’s the energy your home uses when you’re not there and nothing is actively running. And it’s not just homes: it’s common to all buildings — stores, schools, office buildings, even churches! — and makes up a huge portion of most home’s electric use — an average of about a third (see the NRDC report on “Home Idle Load”).

It’s nearly all waste — doing nothing useful — and it’s invisible. It’s like our homes are leaking electricity 24×7.

The amount of this waste is totally dependent on the number and type of appliances and devices plugged in we have plugged in, and sadly you can’t tell how “bad” they are from looking at them. So how to know if it’s a problem?

It’s a lot easier now.  If you have a smart meter, but back when I was trying to figure it out I had to use a stopwatch to time that spinning dial and then do some math to determine that I had over 600 watts of idle load. At the electric rates I was paying at the time, this amounted to over $2,000 per year. That’s a lot of money to spend when I’m not getting anything useful in return.

So the next step was to figure out where those 600 watts were coming from. I gave my 14 year old daughter a Killawatt meter and asked her to go around the house and measure the watts of everything plugged in. I figured it would take a couple hours.

Two weeks later she’d built a great little spreadsheet but was still finding stuff: in the garage, under sinks, outside. She eventually found 93 devices plugged in around the house, and their measured watts came pretty close to the 600 watt total I’d measured from the meter.

Some stuff couldn’t be fixed, like the aquarium, the garage door opener or the cable modem. But many of them were easy to fix, like:

• Unplugging my son’s surround-sound speaker system (he’s away at college)
• Unpluging the old VCR in the guest bedroom (hasn’t been used in years)
• Puting a timer on the battery charger for my old motorcycle (now runs only an hour a day)
• Adding $25 smart strips to our entertainment systems

Since then we’ve also replaced the inefficient appliances that were consuming more than 10 watts with more efficient versions, and as a result our Idle Load is now down to about 300 watts. This is still higher than average (which is around 200 watts), but that invisible leak is now much reduced, and my electric bills are much lower.

Note from Dr. Power:  This NRDC guide can tell you how to track down your home’s Idle Load. Or you can try an app funded by the State of California called Dr Power.