Vampire power is a funny-sounding term with significant real-world implications. You might not think that a “wall wart” or power supply  consumes that much power, but it’s estimated that at least 10% of your home energy bill is from such standby devices. Aggregated, that’s 5% of the electricity used by the US, with a cost of $4 billion a year. And that number is from an article last year. The rising costs of energy should be more than enough to convince consumers that it’s smart to unplug unused devices.

The International Energy Agency has estimated standby energy use by vampire electronics at 200 to 400 terawatt-hours a year. The entire country of Italy consumes about 300 terawatt-hours of electricity each year, according to the agency.

That’s more than a few nuclear power plants dedicated just to supporting devices which are in a nebulous state of not being on but not really being off either. The perceived benefit is so that devices like your television or printer can keep on the lookout for a button press of a remote control or a print job sent over the network. In the meantime, they draw a small but steady supply of energy.

Nokia has begun to address this issue by posting a reminder on its devices’ displays reminding users to unplug their charger from the wall. While the press release describing this initiative is dated from late 2006, I personally have only recently begun to see these messages very recently, specifically on the n810.

To reduce the energy consumption of mobile phones the manufacturers have agreed to take action by equipping phones with reminders to unplug chargers once the battery is recharged. Nokia plans to have these alerts in new phones by the middle of next year.

Nokia estimates that if this measure led to only 10% of the world’s mobile phone users turning off the electricity supply to the chargers after use this would save enough energy in one year to power 60,000 European homes annually.

But that approach, which raising consciousness and definitely headed in the right direction, still requires a bit of work from users.

David Pogue of the New York Times recently wrote about the APC Power-Saving SurgeArrest surge protector power strip (or as they say in England “power lead”, as I believe a power strip is something else entirely…). What’s cool about this device is that it automatically shuts off certain peripherals when your computer shuts down. What’s even cooler is that it’s able to monitor power consumption to the computer (the master) and detect when it’s shifted into sleep mode. At that point, the power strip powers down the slave outlets and the peripherals plugged into them. At a cost of US$28, this device is estimated by the manufacturer to save US$25 a year. There aren’t many decisions where the best choice is as obvious as this one: you save money and you don’t have to do any extra work!

It would be great if home electronics could take such smart technology on-board instead of outsourcing it to a comparatively lowly power strip. We’ve made big advances in battery-powered devices which carefully manage their limited resources, and it would be wonderful to see such technology filter through to those devices which have a permanent plug.

Update:  Found another product similar to the APC model: the Intellipanel or Intelliplug, sold by OneClickPower. It basically does the same thing as the APC model, although it purports to “learn” about the normal energy use of components attached to it and adjust its standby behavior as appropriate.