When you’re at work, sleeping, or just not making use of an appliance, it’s secretly wasting small amounts of electricity, even if the appliance has been turned off! Chances are there are nearly a dozen appliances around your house that suck up electricity when not being used, and depending how bad of offenders that these gadgets are, they could be costing you a lot of money.

Your appliances, such as televisions, computers, and even laptop ac adapters have been wasting electricity for about thirty years now. Before the mid 1970’s, when you turned off an appliance, it was truly off, not even the smallest fraction of a joule was being used. Now when you turn off an appliance, it consumes a small amount of power so that if you turn the device on, it can be used instantaneously. It’s essentially a sleep mode for these appliance. When you have one of these sleep-mode appliances off and plugged in, it wouldn’t be a problem, however you could be wasting $100 a year in electricity by these appliances that are sucking up juice when they’re turned off.

The typical television will cost about $5 to $10 a year when it’s plugged off. The clock that displays the time on your microwave will actually use more energy than actually using the microwave periodically throughout the day. When you start throwing in additional electronics, such as surround sound speakers, DVD players, computers, razors, cell phone charges, printers, electric tooth brushes, lamps, modems, scanners, radios, and more, the cost of the electricity consumed by “powered-off” appliances can add up to be quite a bit. It’s estimated that Americans waste over $1 billion each year in electric bills for electricity that they do not use.

You won’t save a big ton of money by unplugging appliances that you don’t make use of, but why let the money go to waste if all you have to do is unplug an appliance when you don’t use it? If there’s an appliance in your home that you don’t use very often, just unplug it. If there’s a lot of appliances you use on a regular basis, simply put them all on the same power-strip, or better yet surge protector, and then turn off the power-strip when you go to bed or leave home.

With inflation and increasingly scarce energy resources, chances are your electricity bill won’t be going down in the near future, so take some active steps in order to decrease the amount of money you’re sending to the power company.