Portable meters help find your home's energy leeches

From an article by Nick Heynen in the Wisconsin State Journal:

. . . Everyone knows leaving the lights on all the time uses energy and costs money. More people are becoming aware of the power appliances leech from the grid while turned off — called, varyingly, "standby power," "phantom power," and "vampire power."

But the question in both cases is: How much?

Enter portable energy meters, available for free at all Dane County libraries and others across the state. Plug an appliance into the meter, and plug the meter into an outlet, and it displays information about the energy used by that appliance and the cost.

The meters are set by Madison Gas & Electric Co. with the average cost per kilowatt-hour (a measure of energy consumed over time) of electricity, so they can project both the standby power the appliance will use in a month and the cost of that energy.

"We mostly tell people to put it in the monthly cost mode and let it rip, because that's the ultimate question that most people have," said Jonathan Beers, residential services manager at MGE and self-described energy geek . . .