While it’s traditional to keep vampires away with garlic, stakes and silver bullets, in this day and age it’s the “power vampires” that we have to be more careful of.  And garlic’s not going to help you there.  What you need is a wireless smart electricity meter like the efergy meter, to find out which of your appliances are literally sucking the energy out of your home.

Once you’ve established which are the culprits, you can take action.  Here are some tips about where to start looking for
“vampires” in your home.  The television, mobile phone chargers, re-chargeable tools, cordless phones, baby monitors, set-top boxes, video and DVD machines, and desktop PCs.

To tackle the chargers, baby-monitos and re-chargeable tools is simple, just switch them off when they’re no longer charging or in use.

For televisions, set-top boxes, hi-fi’s, video and DVD machines, you can solve your standby issues with a Bye Bye Standby Energy Saving Kit.  Just plug your appliances into the wall via the Bye Bye Standby smart sockets, and use the remote to switch them off properly when you’re not using them.

For your PC, there’s the EcoButton, that switches it all off at the touch of a switch, and all back on again just where you left off.

Photo credit: bryancrump