By: Jane Hodges
Published: March 8, 2011
Reduce your electricity bills by systematically purging your family room of wasteful energy practices.
Family room fun—a video game console, TV, DVR, DVD, and stereo system—comes at a cost reflected monthly in your energy bill. But you could save up to $130 a year in energy costs by recharging, reducing, and replacing energy-sapping electronics.
Here´s a deeper dive into ways to have family fun, and save money, too.
1. Select Energy Star-rated electronics
The three biggest energy hogs in the family room are the plasma television, DVR/TiVo box, and digital cable box, says the nonprofit American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy, which promotes energy efficiency to consumers and government policymakers.
A typical plasma TV (less than 40 inches) consumes 441 kilowatt hours of electricity per year. That translates into about $50 (based on 11.3 cents per kilowatt hour). Next up are TiVo devices at $41 annually, followed by digital cable boxes at $27. Both devices are always on because they constantly receive and download data. Opting for an LCD (liquid crystal display) TV, which costs $8 per year to operate, saves you about $42/year.
And if you use an Energy Star-rated digital cable box (ask your provider if any are available for free), you could pay 30% less for energy—an annual savings of about $8.50. Energy Star hasn´t yet published data on swapping out a DVR or TiVo device.
Next: 2. Reduce standby power
No comments:
Post a Comment