The relentless rise of electricity prices over the past decade has made many consumers more conscientious about how they use electric power. Many of those conscientious people may find it frustrating — to put it mildly — that their daily or even hourly efforts to turn off devices they're not using hasn't delivered the results they'd expected.

The blame belongs to the growing number of "vampire" or "phantom" electronic products that populate today's typical home. An alarmingly large number of electrical products cannot be truly turned off without being unplugged. These 'vampire' products draw power 24 hours a day whether "on" or "off."

These devices draw so-called standby power when they are off, according to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), which has recently completed a large survey that measured the "standby power" in hundreds of products.
So what is "standby power"?

...standby power is electricity used by appliances and equipment while they are switched off or not performing their primary function. That power is consumed by power supplies (the black cubes—sometimes called "vampires"—converting AC into DC), the circuits and sensors needed to receive a remote signal, soft keypads and displays including miscellaneous LED status lights. Standby power use is also caused by circuits that continue to be energized even when the device is "off."

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