Does the prospect of high energy prices this winter make your blood run cold?With Halloween around the corner, Google has come up with a clever solution to help save consumers money on their monstrous heat and energy bills. The site serves up various techniques on how to combat "energy vampires," or electric and heating appliances that literally suck the blood out of the average consumer's bank account and has the ability to worry folks as winter approaches.
So, in order to help users save a good deal of money per year on these appliances, the ghost busters at Google came up with an application called the Google haunted house which gives users a few Halloween-themed tips on how to help minimize home-energy consumption this winter.
Haunted by ghosts? Close the fireplace flue damper. Wanna combat energy vampires? Turn off game consoles when not in use.
Shown on its micro-site here, they serve up savings tips and ways to cut energy waste. The application also gives an estimate of the amount of money one could save if they follow the tips.
When one enters the number of each appliance such as game consoles, computers or lamps that are being used in the house, the haunted house savings calculator automatically gives users a rough figure of the amount of money they could save and the pounds of carbon dioxide that are not not being consumed.
Also, here are a few tips to combat so-called energy vampires:
- Use a power strip with an on/off switch to fully power down home electronics while in standby mode.
- Use a power strip for multiple battery chargers so it can be easily switched off when not actively charging.
- Unplug or switch off all nonessential devices when preparing to travel out of town.
- Unplug your charger for your cordless phone, portable music play or other portable device after its recharged.
- Plug home electronics, such as TVs and DVD players, into power strips and turn the power strips off when the equipment is not in use (TVs and DVDs in standby mode still use several watts of power). However, while unplugging DVRs can save money, they will not be able to record programs while turned off and program scheduling may need to be reset when turned back on.
- Turn off your computer and monitor when not in use. Alternatively, set to hibernation or sleep mode rather than using screen savers, which do not save as much energy.
