There is nothing more amazing than turning off the lights to preserve electricity.

Save a dollar in electricity each day (which is a number I’ve totally made up because there are too many variables involved) and take a walk through your house/abode before leaving it.  Check for lights on, TV’s on, VCR/DVD players on and most importaly stove burners and appliances that might cause a fire.

I frequently find lights abandoned in the ‘on’ position and left to consume watts that I’d prefer to not consume.  A quick walk down the hallway can add up.  Of course if you leave compact fluorescent bulbs on all day long you’ll save a lot in your electricity leak

Today I went on a witch hunt. A hunt to find electricity sucking things plugged into my wall outlets that were drawing current for no good reason. The hunt wasn’t hard and I didn’t burn anything but some calories - which is probably one of the worst forms of exercise, second only to television. But I went through each room of the house and evaluated the things plugged into the wall sockets to make sure that they made sense and weren’t just killing my electric bill one hour at a time.

Things to consider include:

• Does it plug into something that gets used?
• Could it be plugged in and unplugged quite easily?
• Could it be put on a power switch to turn off a group of devices at once to save energy when they’re not in use?
• Could the number of plugs in the outlet create a fire hazard?

These little vampires of electrical energy are probably around your house. I found two things that were drawing current - how about you?