Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Pay there and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heeart Radio and how the tech are you. It's time for a tech Stuff Tidbits Spooky edition. Today we're going to look at the spooky world of them buyer power. Which by that I don't mean being able to turn into a bat or a wolf or missed. We're being able to hypnotize victims. We're not going to talk about being able to enter a building only after being invited. No, we're talking about electronics here. But it's also sometimes called pandom energy spooky. All right, let's um, we'll sweep aside the late night hard TV show post gimmick. I know it was cringe, E I know I did it on purpose. You don't have to tell me how cringe it was. It was a it was a choice. So let's talk about vampire power. Basically, that term refers to the tendency for plug in electronic devices to continue to leach electricity even when those devices are turned off or in a sleep mode. So, for example, let's say you've plugged in a cell phone charger and you just you plugged it into the wall and you just leave the charger plugged in all the time. So when your smartphone needs to recharge, you take the USB side and you plug it into your smartphone and or the lightning side if you're using an iPhone, and then when you're done, you unplug the cable from your smartphone, but you leave the charger plugged into the wall. Well, that charger actually continues to drain electricity all the time when it's plugged in. Uh if you touch a charger and it's warm, that means that it's been consuming electricity and that electricity has been converted into waste heat even though nothing has been plugged into that cable to recharge. That's vampire power. Now, in some cases, this whole vampire power thing, it's not a bug. It's a feature. By that, I mean it's part of standby mode or standby power. This is what keeps certain devices like cable boxes, uh TVs, video game systems, computers. It keeps them ready to come on to full power with as little delay as possible. The devices remain in a low power mode when they are not in use, so that when it does come time to use them. They're ady to spring into action with as little delay as can be created, and that way you don't have a slower powering up sequence frustrating your consumers. Now, way back in the bad old days, I remember having a TV that would take it seemed like the better part of a minute to really power up. Now I'm old. This was an old black and white television that we had, and it was old even when I was a kid, right Like, this was not a brand new TV. Color TV was definitely around in the seventies, y'all. We had a color TV. It's just this was an extra one, like a smaller black and white TV that we happened to have, and I got to keep it in my room. Um, I don't remember really watching much on it, but yeah, you would turn the power on and then slowly, you know, gradually the image would take shape on the screen, and even after it formed, it would actually take a little bit longer for the screen to reach the right level of brightness, so it would gradually get a little brighter. I didn't think of it as taking our super long time back then, because I mean, I didn't have a whole lot to compare it to our color television also took a while to come on, um, because this is the c R T days, and the TV at least the black and white one was likely on its last TV legs, So you know, you didn't have very high expectations. But you skip ahead and now we've got all these high tech TVs, whether it's q LED or O LEAD or you know, there was that that time briefly when plasma TVs were a big thing. Some of y'all might still have lasma televisions. And you know, you also have a consumer base that has come to expect instant gratification and that's hard to deliver upon. So to meet that expectation, standby power is often the go to strategy. The television or you know, similar device like video game console or whatever. It doesn't have to go from zero to top speed in an instant because it's idling at a lower speed, if you will. It's ready to accelerate once you hit that power button, but it never is actually staying still. To continue that analogy, and here's the crazy thing about vampire power, folks, over the lifetime of certain products, especially things like microwaves or even televisions, the device might actually consume more power when it's not in use then when it is in use. Now I'm talking about over the lifetime of the DV, not on your average day or even your average month, but when you add up the entire lifespan of when you bought the thing, plugged it in, and when you finally got rid of it. A lot of these devices, if you were to tally up there there uh a contribution to your electricity bill, you would find that they actually cost more collectively on the times they were off than when the times they were on. So in most cases, the amount of electricity these devices are pulling when they're off or in standby mode is much less than when you're actively using them. Some the gap is actually pretty small, like certain TVs, it's not that big of a gap between when the television is actually being used and when it's in standby mode. But for other devices it is remarkably different. Like it's a massive difference. Um, But you know, you're only using these devices for a relatively short amount of time compared to the rest of the time or in your home, right like you're not running your microwave all day. I hope that would be bad. Microwaves are designed to heat food very very quickly. So the length of time that you own a microwave, you know, you only use that a tiny bit, Like if you made that a pie chart for how long you own the microwave versus how much of that time you you actually use the microwave. It's a tiny sliver, and yet it can pull more electricity when it's off collectively than when it's on. Now, in the case of micro is, by the way, it's not so much that that devices in standby mode as it requires electricity to power what are called background functions, you know, like that digital clock, which I'm going to rant about later in this episode. So what this amounts to is, as you would imagine, a lot of wasted electricity, a lot of electricity that your home is using that isn't actually going to power anything actively, like it's not an active use, So that electricity is just kind of going down the drain. That in turn leads to some pretty hefty electricity bills, or at least inflated electricity bills. So my co worker Robert Lamb, one of the hosts of Stuff to Blew Your Mind, he wrote an article way back in the house stuff works days about vampire power. Uh. And in that article he cites a figure that US consumers spend around eight billion dollars more on a tricity per year thanks to vampire power. So if you take whatever the US consumers spend per year on electricity, eight billion of that is just because of devices that aren't in active use. Now, I'm not sure when Robert actually wrote that article. I know it did have to be a long time ago because we haven't been part of how stuff works for several years now. But in our DC dot org submits that today it's much much worse than eight billion dollars. That figure, according to in our DC dot org, is now around nineteen billion dollars spent to power in active electronics each year, and there are other sources that have even higher estimates. Now, granted, these are estimates, right, It's not like we have a meter that we can just look at and say, oh, and here's how much the vampire power has cost this year, So you have to keep that in mind. These are estimates. But if you're in the nineteen billion dollar neighborhood, and again I saw one estimate that went as high as I think twenty six billion dollars. It's significant. It's a significant amount of money being wasted to power devices that aren't actually being used. So all too old estimates PEG vampire power is contributing to between fourteen to twenty percent of your electricity bill UM, So again it's significant. It even if your average bill isn't that high, a significant part of that bill comes from things that you're not actively using, at least not all month. And considering that at least some of that electricity depending on where you're at, you know, it's it's not for each of you, but you know, some of us are are depending upon electricity that comes to us courtesy of coal and natural gas, those kind of power plants, power plants that use fossil fuels. It means for us that our plugged in but otherwise unused electronics are contribu reading to problems like pollution and climate change. So not only does vampire power cost you money, it potentially is also causing an environmental issue. Now, granted, if your power is coming from primarily like hydro electric power or some other renewable source, it's different, right, Like your your power is not coming from a coal powered power plant, then obviously the environmental issue doesn't really play as big a part. The financial one still does, but not the environmental. But for a lot of folks, including myself, my power comes from a power company that still largely depends upon coal and natural gas. So that's something else for me to consider. All Right, I'm gonna talk more about the spooky effects of vampire power after we come back from these messages. Okay, let's talk about some of the devices that have the worst reputations for vampire power. Those would include things like set top boxes. The king of those would be digital cable boxes that incorporate DVRs because even with their quote unquote off, they're really on in order to be able to leap into action and record stuff and all that kind of thing. That can lead to vampire costs of nearly fifty dollars a year just an off mode. So you're spending an extra fifty bucks just for having that off. That's, you know, significant, Think about what else you can have for that fifty bucks. Game consoles coming around twenty six dollars per year if you're just allowing them to be in standby mode. Some game consoles actually let you turn that feature off when you first get them where you know, it's a setting where when you turn the console off, it really is off. But most consoles allow for standby mode so that you can do like a remote power thing with your controller um and that it doesn't take as long for the console to come up online, so that you're not you know, sitting around for a minute or two waiting for it to finish the boot up sequence. K TV might come in closer to twenty two dollars of vampire power per year. Computers and idle mode kind of have similar issues. If you have a desktop that you're just putting into sleep mode, then it comes in around twenty three dollars fifty cents per year. Laptops are a little less, like seventeen dollars fifty cents a year. There are other electronics that are much less greedy for electricity, like that phone charger which I talked about the beginning. Your typical phone charger might be sucking down like twenty cents of electricity per year when it's not plugged into anything. So in that case, yeah, you know, it's constantly pulling on electricity, but it's not a lot. So in the grand scheme of things, it's a small it's a small consideration, but our electronics are definitely sapping electricity even when we're not using them. So what can we do about that? All right? There are a few different options. One is that we can use power strips that have a cut off switch on them, so I'm talking about ones that actually have a switch. You can do searches for these. There's a bunch of different types, um that have different ratings and things. But the idea is that when you are not using the electronics that are plugged into that strip, you can turn the strip to off and it actually does cut off all the electricity going to those devices. They will not be able to draw power because the power strip itself prevents it from happening. UM. Obviously, a big downside with that is that if you turn the power strip off, it affects everything that's been plugged into it. So if it's something where you wanted to you say, your stereo system, which is plugged into the same power strip as your television, and you can't just turn the power strip off so that the TV is not pulling vampire power because your stereo systems plugged into it too. So that's clearly like a downside to that, you have to sit there and think, all right, how do I plug this in where the stuff that's all going to be on at the same time makes sense and the stuff that's all going to be off at the same time makes sense, And that starts to get into like a kind of ridiculous scenario depending upon what you're looking at, right, But that is one option. Um you could also manually unplugged devices after use. That's also a hassle, there's no doubt about that, like to have to go through and actually unplugged stuff step by step. And some devices like your coffee maker draw or your charger for that matter, they draw so little power in comparison to say a microwave that there's not much point in doing it. Like, yes, you could unplug your phone charger from the wall, and it's not bad to do it. It's not a bad idea, but it's not making as big a difference, right that twenty cents of electricity per year. It's it's a negligible amount. I mean every little bit helps, yes, but compared to things like your microwave, of your TVs, your digital cable boxes, it's nothing. So it really, you know, you can kind of get away with just keeping it plugged in if you're taking out some of the bigger guys, right your TV is, your audio systems, your set top boxes, that can make a real difference to your power bill. For stuff like computers, you can choose to shut them down when you're done using them rather than just putting them into sleep mode. However, and boy I love these howevers, there is a potential issue there. Every time you turn on the computer, it has to go through the whole boot up sequence, and there is a surge of electricity when this happens that actually does produce a little wear and tear on the computer itself. And if your computer happens to have things like hard disk drive in it, well that physically has to spin up to be used. And so there is an argument to be made that shutting down your computer entirely and then turning it on every time you want to use it can actually reduce the useful lifespan of your computer. It will wear out faster. Then we get into a very complicated issue because if it turns out you're going to have to replace your computer on a shorter schedule, like slightly more frequently and I'm not talking about like going from replacing it every you know, five years, to every year and a half or something, but it will be a shorter schedule. That means you also end up placing demands all up and down the supply chain, and there's this ripple effect going on. Right. So, like you might say, oh, I saved on electricity, but because I have to buy this computer more frequently, the long term budget effects and the long term environmental impact are actually worse because of having to replace the machine. Now, personally, I think shutting down your computer is a good idea if you're done using it for the day. That's what I do. Once I'm done for the day, I'll turn it off. But if you're gonna be going back and forth to a computer during the day, I would say just leave it an idle mode between sessions because it's gonna require less wear and tear. The idle mode is not going to pull nearly as much electricity as when it's on. So as long as you are shutting it off after you're done using it, I think things are pretty much okay. But that's my personal opinion on this matter. I actually read several articles about this and let's just say there's a lack of consensus on the matter. Now, beyond the inconvenience of unplugging stuff, there are other frustrations. And this is where I get back to that darn digital clock, especially on things like, you know, microwaves. So if you were to unplug your microwave after use, it means you either have to be willing to put up with the fact that you're gonna have digital mockery there's this clock face that's gonna be blinking at you every time you plug it back in, or you actually go through the foolish steps of setting the clock each and every time. And therein lies madness. And yeah, that's a little thing, but you can see how heavily it weighs on me. One big thing we can do when we shop for electronics in the first place, is we can look for Energy Star certification on those devices. The Environmental Protection Agency sets the standards for energy efficiency that are required to meet in order to qualify as an Energy Star certified device. So products that have the Energy Star label have to meet certain efficiency, quality and performance standards. Now, that does not necessarily mean that a product that doesn't have the label is automatically worse, but does mean we don't really know because it hasn't been certified, so it's better to look for that label. Hey Jonathan, I hear some of you asked, what do you do about your electronics? Well, if I'm leaving my house for any length of time, like a weekend trip or something, I'll switch off the power switches to certain devices, but I'll leave others on, like I leave my wifind out work on, because I can do stuff like access certain smart home features while I'm away. If I'm gone for a longer amount of time, then I tend to unplug and shut down more of my stuff. But in my day to day I'm pretty guilty of leaving things in standby mode, which honestly I should probably stop doing because being aware of how that adds to the power load means I'm part of the problem. There's only so far individual or responsibility can take us, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't do our own part. And that's it for this tech stuff tidbits on Vampire Power. Hope you enjoyed it. Reach out to me if you have suggestions for the show. You can do that on Twitter. Tech Stuff hs W and or you can download the iHeart Radio app. Go to tech Stuff, use a little microphone icon, leave me a voice message, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tex Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i our Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Pay there and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heeart Radio and how the tech are you. It's time for a tech Stuff Tidbits Spooky edition. Today we're going to look at the spooky world of them buyer power. Which by that I don't mean being able to turn into a bat or a wolf or missed. We're being able to hypnotize victims. We're not going to talk about being able to enter a building only after being invited. No, we're talking about electronics here. But it's also sometimes called pandom energy spooky. All right, let's um, we'll sweep aside the late night hard TV show post gimmick. I know it was cringe, E I know I did it on purpose. You don't have to tell me how cringe it was. It was a it was a choice. So let's talk about vampire power. Basically, that term refers to the tendency for plug in electronic devices to continue to leach electricity even when those devices are turned off or in a sleep mode. So, for example, let's say you've plugged in a cell phone charger and you just you plugged it into the wall and you just leave the charger plugged in all the time. So when your smartphone needs to recharge, you take the USB side and you plug it into your smartphone and or the lightning side if you're using an iPhone, and then when you're done, you unplug the cable from your smartphone, but you leave the charger plugged into the wall. Well, that charger actually continues to drain electricity all the time when it's plugged in. Uh if you touch a charger and it's warm, that means that it's been consuming electricity and that electricity has been converted into waste heat even though nothing has been plugged into that cable to recharge. That's vampire power. Now, in some cases, this whole vampire power thing, it's not a bug. It's a feature. By that, I mean it's part of standby mode or standby power. This is what keeps certain devices like cable boxes, uh TVs, video game systems, computers. It keeps them ready to come on to full power with as little delay as possible. The devices remain in a low power mode when they are not in use, so that when it does come time to use them. They're ady to spring into action with as little delay as can be created, and that way you don't have a slower powering up sequence frustrating your consumers. Now, way back in the bad old days, I remember having a TV that would take it seemed like the better part of a minute to really power up. Now I'm old. This was an old black and white television that we had, and it was old even when I was a kid, right Like, this was not a brand new TV. Color TV was definitely around in the seventies, y'all. We had a color TV. It's just this was an extra one, like a smaller black and white TV that we happened to have, and I got to keep it in my room. Um, I don't remember really watching much on it, but yeah, you would turn the power on and then slowly, you know, gradually the image would take shape on the screen, and even after it formed, it would actually take a little bit longer for the screen to reach the right level of brightness, so it would gradually get a little brighter. I didn't think of it as taking our super long time back then, because I mean, I didn't have a whole lot to compare it to our color television also took a while to come on, um, because this is the c R T days, and the TV at least the black and white one was likely on its last TV legs, So you know, you didn't have very high expectations. But you skip ahead and now we've got all these high tech TVs, whether it's q LED or O LEAD or you know, there was that that time briefly when plasma TVs were a big thing. Some of y'all might still have lasma televisions. And you know, you also have a consumer base that has come to expect instant gratification and that's hard to deliver upon. So to meet that expectation, standby power is often the go to strategy. The television or you know, similar device like video game console or whatever. It doesn't have to go from zero to top speed in an instant because it's idling at a lower speed, if you will. It's ready to accelerate once you hit that power button, but it never is actually staying still. To continue that analogy, and here's the crazy thing about vampire power, folks, over the lifetime of certain products, especially things like microwaves or even televisions, the device might actually consume more power when it's not in use then when it is in use. Now I'm talking about over the lifetime of the DV, not on your average day or even your average month, but when you add up the entire lifespan of when you bought the thing, plugged it in, and when you finally got rid of it. A lot of these devices, if you were to tally up there there uh a contribution to your electricity bill, you would find that they actually cost more collectively on the times they were off than when the times they were on. So in most cases, the amount of electricity these devices are pulling when they're off or in standby mode is much less than when you're actively using them. Some the gap is actually pretty small, like certain TVs, it's not that big of a gap between when the television is actually being used and when it's in standby mode. But for other devices it is remarkably different. Like it's a massive difference. Um, But you know, you're only using these devices for a relatively short amount of time compared to the rest of the time or in your home, right like you're not running your microwave all day. I hope that would be bad. Microwaves are designed to heat food very very quickly. So the length of time that you own a microwave, you know, you only use that a tiny bit, Like if you made that a pie chart for how long you own the microwave versus how much of that time you you actually use the microwave. It's a tiny sliver, and yet it can pull more electricity when it's off collectively than when it's on. Now, in the case of micro is, by the way, it's not so much that that devices in standby mode as it requires electricity to power what are called background functions, you know, like that digital clock, which I'm going to rant about later in this episode. So what this amounts to is, as you would imagine, a lot of wasted electricity, a lot of electricity that your home is using that isn't actually going to power anything actively, like it's not an active use, So that electricity is just kind of going down the drain. That in turn leads to some pretty hefty electricity bills, or at least inflated electricity bills. So my co worker Robert Lamb, one of the hosts of Stuff to Blew Your Mind, he wrote an article way back in the house stuff works days about vampire power. Uh. And in that article he cites a figure that US consumers spend around eight billion dollars more on a tricity per year thanks to vampire power. So if you take whatever the US consumers spend per year on electricity, eight billion of that is just because of devices that aren't in active use. Now, I'm not sure when Robert actually wrote that article. I know it did have to be a long time ago because we haven't been part of how stuff works for several years now. But in our DC dot org submits that today it's much much worse than eight billion dollars. That figure, according to in our DC dot org, is now around nineteen billion dollars spent to power in active electronics each year, and there are other sources that have even higher estimates. Now, granted, these are estimates, right, It's not like we have a meter that we can just look at and say, oh, and here's how much the vampire power has cost this year, So you have to keep that in mind. These are estimates. But if you're in the nineteen billion dollar neighborhood, and again I saw one estimate that went as high as I think twenty six billion dollars. It's significant. It's a significant amount of money being wasted to power devices that aren't actually being used. So all too old estimates PEG vampire power is contributing to between fourteen to twenty percent of your electricity bill UM, So again it's significant. It even if your average bill isn't that high, a significant part of that bill comes from things that you're not actively using, at least not all month. And considering that at least some of that electricity depending on where you're at, you know, it's it's not for each of you, but you know, some of us are are depending upon electricity that comes to us courtesy of coal and natural gas, those kind of power plants, power plants that use fossil fuels. It means for us that our plugged in but otherwise unused electronics are contribu reading to problems like pollution and climate change. So not only does vampire power cost you money, it potentially is also causing an environmental issue. Now, granted, if your power is coming from primarily like hydro electric power or some other renewable source, it's different, right, Like your your power is not coming from a coal powered power plant, then obviously the environmental issue doesn't really play as big a part. The financial one still does, but not the environmental. But for a lot of folks, including myself, my power comes from a power company that still largely depends upon coal and natural gas. So that's something else for me to consider. All Right, I'm gonna talk more about the spooky effects of vampire power after we come back from these messages. Okay, let's talk about some of the devices that have the worst reputations for vampire power. Those would include things like set top boxes. The king of those would be digital cable boxes that incorporate DVRs because even with their quote unquote off, they're really on in order to be able to leap into action and record stuff and all that kind of thing. That can lead to vampire costs of nearly fifty dollars a year just an off mode. So you're spending an extra fifty bucks just for having that off. That's, you know, significant, Think about what else you can have for that fifty bucks. Game consoles coming around twenty six dollars per year if you're just allowing them to be in standby mode. Some game consoles actually let you turn that feature off when you first get them where you know, it's a setting where when you turn the console off, it really is off. But most consoles allow for standby mode so that you can do like a remote power thing with your controller um and that it doesn't take as long for the console to come up online, so that you're not you know, sitting around for a minute or two waiting for it to finish the boot up sequence. K TV might come in closer to twenty two dollars of vampire power per year. Computers and idle mode kind of have similar issues. If you have a desktop that you're just putting into sleep mode, then it comes in around twenty three dollars fifty cents per year. Laptops are a little less, like seventeen dollars fifty cents a year. There are other electronics that are much less greedy for electricity, like that phone charger which I talked about the beginning. Your typical phone charger might be sucking down like twenty cents of electricity per year when it's not plugged into anything. So in that case, yeah, you know, it's constantly pulling on electricity, but it's not a lot. So in the grand scheme of things, it's a small it's a small consideration, but our electronics are definitely sapping electricity even when we're not using them. So what can we do about that? All right? There are a few different options. One is that we can use power strips that have a cut off switch on them, so I'm talking about ones that actually have a switch. You can do searches for these. There's a bunch of different types, um that have different ratings and things. But the idea is that when you are not using the electronics that are plugged into that strip, you can turn the strip to off and it actually does cut off all the electricity going to those devices. They will not be able to draw power because the power strip itself prevents it from happening. UM. Obviously, a big downside with that is that if you turn the power strip off, it affects everything that's been plugged into it. So if it's something where you wanted to you say, your stereo system, which is plugged into the same power strip as your television, and you can't just turn the power strip off so that the TV is not pulling vampire power because your stereo systems plugged into it too. So that's clearly like a downside to that, you have to sit there and think, all right, how do I plug this in where the stuff that's all going to be on at the same time makes sense and the stuff that's all going to be off at the same time makes sense, And that starts to get into like a kind of ridiculous scenario depending upon what you're looking at, right, But that is one option. Um you could also manually unplugged devices after use. That's also a hassle, there's no doubt about that, like to have to go through and actually unplugged stuff step by step. And some devices like your coffee maker draw or your charger for that matter, they draw so little power in comparison to say a microwave that there's not much point in doing it. Like, yes, you could unplug your phone charger from the wall, and it's not bad to do it. It's not a bad idea, but it's not making as big a difference, right that twenty cents of electricity per year. It's it's a negligible amount. I mean every little bit helps, yes, but compared to things like your microwave, of your TVs, your digital cable boxes, it's nothing. So it really, you know, you can kind of get away with just keeping it plugged in if you're taking out some of the bigger guys, right your TV is, your audio systems, your set top boxes, that can make a real difference to your power bill. For stuff like computers, you can choose to shut them down when you're done using them rather than just putting them into sleep mode. However, and boy I love these howevers, there is a potential issue there. Every time you turn on the computer, it has to go through the whole boot up sequence, and there is a surge of electricity when this happens that actually does produce a little wear and tear on the computer itself. And if your computer happens to have things like hard disk drive in it, well that physically has to spin up to be used. And so there is an argument to be made that shutting down your computer entirely and then turning it on every time you want to use it can actually reduce the useful lifespan of your computer. It will wear out faster. Then we get into a very complicated issue because if it turns out you're going to have to replace your computer on a shorter schedule, like slightly more frequently and I'm not talking about like going from replacing it every you know, five years, to every year and a half or something, but it will be a shorter schedule. That means you also end up placing demands all up and down the supply chain, and there's this ripple effect going on. Right. So, like you might say, oh, I saved on electricity, but because I have to buy this computer more frequently, the long term budget effects and the long term environmental impact are actually worse because of having to replace the machine. Now, personally, I think shutting down your computer is a good idea if you're done using it for the day. That's what I do. Once I'm done for the day, I'll turn it off. But if you're gonna be going back and forth to a computer during the day, I would say just leave it an idle mode between sessions because it's gonna require less wear and tear. The idle mode is not going to pull nearly as much electricity as when it's on. So as long as you are shutting it off after you're done using it, I think things are pretty much okay. But that's my personal opinion on this matter. I actually read several articles about this and let's just say there's a lack of consensus on the matter. Now, beyond the inconvenience of unplugging stuff, there are other frustrations. And this is where I get back to that darn digital clock, especially on things like, you know, microwaves. So if you were to unplug your microwave after use, it means you either have to be willing to put up with the fact that you're gonna have digital mockery there's this clock face that's gonna be blinking at you every time you plug it back in, or you actually go through the foolish steps of setting the clock each and every time. And therein lies madness. And yeah, that's a little thing, but you can see how heavily it weighs on me. One big thing we can do when we shop for electronics in the first place, is we can look for Energy Star certification on those devices. The Environmental Protection Agency sets the standards for energy efficiency that are required to meet in order to qualify as an Energy Star certified device. So products that have the Energy Star label have to meet certain efficiency, quality and performance standards. Now, that does not necessarily mean that a product that doesn't have the label is automatically worse, but does mean we don't really know because it hasn't been certified, so it's better to look for that label. Hey Jonathan, I hear some of you asked, what do you do about your electronics? Well, if I'm leaving my house for any length of time, like a weekend trip or something, I'll switch off the power switches to certain devices, but I'll leave others on, like I leave my wifind out work on, because I can do stuff like access certain smart home features while I'm away. If I'm gone for a longer amount of time, then I tend to unplug and shut down more of my stuff. But in my day to day I'm pretty guilty of leaving things in standby mode, which honestly I should probably stop doing because being aware of how that adds to the power load means I'm part of the problem. There's only so far individual or responsibility can take us, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't do our own part. And that's it for this tech stuff tidbits on Vampire Power. Hope you enjoyed it. Reach out to me if you have suggestions for the show. You can do that on Twitter. Tech Stuff hs W and or you can download the iHeart Radio app. Go to tech Stuff, use a little microphone icon, leave me a voice message, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tex Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i our Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H