When my close friends or family members sees me shutting down the power on button in the morning and/or powering it off in the night On the power strip where all of my entertainment devices such as TV screen, Apple TV and PS4 are plugged in, they laugh that whether those saved “5 euros” ( which is almost 6 dollars ) will make me rich. They are saying whether I will go ahead and buy 1-2 more burgers for that price and continue with laugh. While I do not fully disagree with them, I prefer to save where I believe the money are anyway wasted and instead use them for something more meaningful in my life. It does not mean that when I will sacrifice all of my joy for example playing PS4 games or watching TV series just to reduce electricity bill, no it is not about being cheap but becoming more frugal.

I am trying to avoid phantom or vampire power consumption which is really unnecessary. In reality savings from powering on/off device can add up and become significant amount over the years or even faster with many family members in the same household. I am better off saving and then investing the money in the right places, so it allows them to grow.

Any type of expense that is paid on reoccurring intervals are the one that really matter and will add up over the time. One of the significant expenses that today’s households have and which you can already guess are related to the electricity. Electricity consumption is increasing with the number of the devices in the household. Families or even single person do have multiple electronic devices in the home and they keep increasing with the new technologies being introduced to the market.

As with anything else nothing can be improved when it is not being measured. Even if it is possible, it will be pure guess work. The way I am measuring the power consumption is by leveraging pretty affordable smart power plug Elgato Eve Energy – you can read more about it on my another article named “Smart electricity/energy savings in the modern world”.

We do typically have enabled constantly plenty devices, during day and also during the night hours. One of the greatest example of such device, that I believe is nowadays in each flat or house and it is a Wireless Router (device that provides Internet over Ethernet cable and/or also via Wireless connection). Really who does not have one ???

First of all, running constantly Wifi around you is most likely not healthy choice, so why not to turn off the wireless feature either directly by leveraging scheduling feature in the router if it has such thing like on my personal router which I use – Linksys AE6900. In the below picture you can see in dark blue color what hours my router is setup to have wireless feature off.

I do use this feature in case I am downloading something over night over Ethernet cable on the PC or laptop, but do not need mobile phone, tablet, TV or any other devices to be connected to Internet via Wifi. Otherwise if the device is not needed to be used over Ethernet cable or wireless then I would have device to be completely shutdown by using smart power plug that I mentioned earlier.

By disabling the wireless feature at specific hours when we are at work or are sleeping will improve our quality of sleep and save also some money by lowering electricity bill when we decide to shutdown the device off. Imagine situation that you are at work during workday let’s say from Monday to Friday for about 9 hours including the time you get there and back, plus you sleep daily 8 hours. See if we sum up those numbers we have 17 hours in this particular example during which we are not using the WiFi and/or are not at home, so really why to leave devices constantly on? By above mentioned example it really seems that in the most cases we do not need devices to be consuming electricity for most part of the day, so that means that this could really add up into our savings, yay, who does not like more money in their account? 🙂

Here is example of my personal Wireless router Linksys AE 6900 that I use and have WiFi schedule feature in case you like it and your current model does not have it.

Before you judge whether the savings on electricity make sense and how much you can save, please do measure the impact and feel free to let me know your results! 🙂