Vanquish the vampires. Remember James Thurber's story about the aunt who worried that electricity was leaking out of the wall sockets? She had a point, of sorts. Appliances that include a clock or operate by a remote, as well as chargers, "are all sucking electricity even when you're not using them," says Dale Bryk of the National Resources Defense Council. Of the total energy used to run home electronics, 40% is consumed when the appliances are turned off.

The obvious way to pull the plug on so-called energy vampires is to do just that -- pull the plug. If you don't want to keep rebooting your PC, you can reduce the juice to it by putting both the monitor and the computer itself in sleep mode when they're not in use. Computers operating on snooze control use about 95% less electricity than those running on full power.

To get yours to nod off, go to the control panel, where you will likely see "sleep" or "hibernate." The sleep mode powers down the computer, whereas instructing it to "hibernate" effectively turns the PC off while preserving your applications. Both modes let you resume work where you left off.

If your computer powers down by default, you can adjust how long it waits before going to sleep -- say, from 30 minutes to 15 -- or set the monitor to power down first. Don't bother using a screen saver, which neither preserves your screen nor saves energy.



"My phone gives me an alert when it is done charging and recommends that I unplug the charger to save energy. I figured that leaving appliances plugged in when they are not being used sucked up energy, but I didn't know that it was so much. This is an extremely cost effective way to go green and save some green because pulling a plug on your appliances at night is free. I know that 40% of my energy bill back into my pocket would be a nice little bonus. It may seem like a hassle, but in the long run, five extra minutes unplugging unused appliances does a lot of good."- Jessica