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Top 5 Energy-Sucking Vampire Appliances

There’s a vampire in your home, and it's feeding off of the energy from your electronics (i.e. your cell phone or laptop). The average American home has about 40 appliances constantly sucking power-- a whopping 10% of all electricity is wasted on vampire power. That's why we decided to compile a list of the top five energy wasting products in your house as well as things you can do to fight these vampires...other than garlic.

The T.V. Plasma TVs can suck up over 1,400 kilowatt hours annually, which can cost over $150 bucks. Not only do energy vampires waste electricity, but they end up wasting your money too. The simplest way to save energy with your TV is to unplug it when you leave the house. You may only watch 3 or 4 hours of TV a day, but it keeps sucking away like a hungry animal for the other 20 hours. LCD screens still waste energy too, though substantially less.
Video games. Game consoles like PlayStation, Xbox, and Wii can waste around 230 kilowatt hours a year, which is around $25. You could buy another game with that money! If you don't want to unplug your box, appliances often have a second "off" switch hidden on the back. The first off-switch puts the device into standby mode--that's why there's still a little green light illuminated--but when you press the other off-switch, it actually kills the power.
Laptop. Your laptop is another energy-sucking culprit, costing about $15 in wasted energy. While you may love charging it while you're gone all day, it's far more energy conscious to unplug it, and wait until you get home to charge the battery. Even if your laptop is fully charged, if it's plugged into the wall, it's still using energy.
DVD player. This appliance you only use a few times a week, when left plugged in, still uses energy 24/7! It'll eventually waste 78 kilowatts a year-- that's around $8. Unplug it! You can plug it back in when you want to watch Twilight for the 40th time.
Cell Phone chargers. The amount of energy sucked out by cell phone chargers while not plugged into your phone isn't huge on its own, but add that to your DVD player, laptop, TV, and video game console, and it's a lot of vampire energy down the drain. Cell phone chargers are the easiest items to unplug--they're useless without your phone!