Saturday, October 10, 1998

Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - The television is quite, the VCR is dark and the furnace isn't running, yet your electric meter is spinning furiously. That's because appliances in your home are leaking electricity and money.

Most home electronics are never really turned off, despite what their buttons say. They are on standby. While they wait, electricity courses through their circuits - and money flows out of your wallet.

Because this wasted power costs billions of dollars a year and pollutes the air, government and industry are teaming up to stop the consumption of electricity in home appliances that are never really off.

``It's one of those things that people don't ever think about,'' said Joseph Romm, former assistant U.S. secretary of energy for energy efficiency. Yet growth in the use of home electronics - most of which waste great quantities of electricity - is responsible for most of the steady increase in residential power consumption in recent years.

The average home owner spends about $50 a year to supply power to equipment that supposedly is off. That adds up to more than $3 billion - $1 billion alone for televisions and VCRs - for the country as a whole, energy experts said.

It takes 10 power plants to supply electricity to those wasteful appliances in the United States alone, Romm said. Those plants produce more pollution than 6 million cars.

The problem is that people - especially engineers - have misused the word ``off,'' said Alan Meier, who led a recent study on home electricity use at the Lawrence Berkeley Labs on the University of California's Berkeley campus. Too often, ``off'' doesn't mean ``off'' anymore, he said.

``No one thought about it,'' said Mark Small, vice president of environment for Sony Corp. ``Everyone thought you look at a television set, it's off, so it's actually off. ... That TV you think is off could be consuming 5 to 20 watts of power.''

In January the EPA started an Energy Star program to encourage companies to re-engineer their televisions and VCRs to use less power while on standby. The EPA plans to extend that program to the stereo and audio industry. A similar program, also called Energy Star, has been in place for office equipment since 1993.

Unlike other efforts to save energy, re-engineering to save leaking electricity is relatively easy and costs next to nothing, experts said. Officials at Sony and Panasonic put the cost of charges at less than a dollar per electronic device.