By Jenny Suo
How much are you paying to not use your appliances? The answer is quite a lot.
New Zealanders waste over $100 million a year leaving appliances on standby instead of turning them off at the wall.
And a new survey has found a large number of kiwi households have no idea what they're spending on power.
The Energy Spot campaign says it all. “What uses a lot of energy, but we get very little benefit from? Electronics on standby.”
But how many of us actually turn off appliances at the wall?
Lisa Fothergill says she doesn’t do it.
“It’s kind of an inconvenience if you have to go and turn everything off at the wall once you've finished with it. No one does it. It’s not something you think about.”
But perhaps people should. The Electricity Authority's survey found one in every 10 Kiwi households don't know how much they spend on power.
Electricity Authority chief executive Carl Hansen says that means they also don't know how much they could be saving.
“I think one thing that people are perhaps not aware of is that there have been big changes in competition in the market.”
That's not all - the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority (EECA) says a lot can be saved by shutting those appliances off fully.
“There are many appliances that we only use for a short period of time,” EECA products manager Terry Collins says. “Yet we leave them on for long periods of time - DVDs, speakers on our computers, printers. So over a year they end up using more power than what we actually use when we're using them.”
In fact 7 percent of an average household bill is wasted on standby power.
And the total energy wasted like this nationwide is enough to power the city of Nelson all year.
3 News
source: newshub archive
