Beware of Vampires

The lurid headline of the article warned of the four “vampire” appliances whose sole reason for existence, it seems, is to raise your energy bills.

My wife, Kim, sent me the link to the article as we were spending a Sunday afternoon procrastinating doing household chores.

Kim is afraid of vampires. Or at least goes through the motions of being concerned anytime she gets the alert from our credit union that the automatic payment for the city utility bill is coming out.

Like many other responsible grown-ups who pay their own utility bills, the time period between when you are finally able to turn off the heat and when you have to turn on the air conditioner is golden. It is on the same level of having your child become potty-trained and you are no longer needing to spend a sizable portion of your weekly household budget on diapers, but not quite to the level of when they are no longer in fulltime daycare.

Much to the annoyance of my children, I have become very much a typical father in that I routinely turn down the temperature to keep the house cooler in winter and keep the thermostat turned up in the summer to keep the house warmer. My son has stopped saying anything to me about it, because whenever he does I typically send him outside to cut the grass. It is amazing how much cooler the house feels when you come in from having spent a half hour mowing a lawn.

It was with interest that I clicked on the link to see what font of wisdom there would be and if there would be any practical takeaways. I knew better than to expect much more than a rehash of dozens of previous articles of a similar nature. Within newsrooms, it is the type of story you assign to the new staff members as something they can’t really screw up.

I was not disappointed in reading the article. It seems the writer took their assignment seriously and in doing so took an almost comically aggressive stand against socalled energy vampires. Much like their blood-sucking counterparts these energy vampires lurk in the shadows sucking electricity and money from your pocket books.

However, there are practical limits and even major questions if the suggestions have real benefit or if they are just so you can brag to your friends about how energy aware you are while secretly living in misery. For example, I am doubtful of the net savings of unplugging a modern television when not in use or of drastically increasing or decreasing the thermostat settings whenever you leave your home. Others make sense, like not leaving empty chargers plugged in or a fan turned on high all day long when you are not going to be home.

The choice of how far you are willing to go in order to save energy is a highly personal one within some broad limits. We all know people who think nothing of having the heat cranked up to 90 degrees in the winter and opening a window or door to cool down. On the other extreme are those who keep their air conditioning running full-blast and then opening a window to let in a breeze on a hot summer day.

As with all things, there needs to be a balance between enjoying the conveniences of modern society and being wasteful. Where people fall along that spectrum depends on their household budgets or personal philosophies.

Brian Wilson is News Editor at The Star News.