Happy Friday — we’re back with more Hot Bones, and more subscribers. Welcome! The general gist of these emails is you get a story + solution up top, and then there’s local sustainability recs for Charlottesville, VA, at the bottom. Fun random sections are in the middle. 

Last week was the first official HB interview (lots of recs on G’s favorite sustainable brands). This week is all about how you can lower your energy bill a bit and increase your happiness a bit more, all without leaving your house.

So G typically cooks dinner and I clean, a system we developed when we first moved in together and I cooked us soggy rice pasta three days in a row.

An addendum to my cleaning responsibilities is that I also pre-make the coffee for tomorrow, a system we developed after I worked in the least successful coffee shop/bike store in DC before grad school (mainly I unloaded the dishwasher and prayed no one ordered a cortado).

Earlier this week we were doing our usual post-dinner routine when I noticed we were running low on coffee. I distinctly remember telling G in that moment, “hey we’re almost out of coffee.” But when we replayed this scene the following evening when we both witnessed the empty coffee bean canister, it turns out I had not been so clear.

Because my headphones were in and G was on the phone at the time, my message became a whisper of “OuTtttt oF CoFFeE” and her nod was actually assenting to “I’m making us coffee! You’re so pretty!”

Which is why that next night I stood in the breakfast aisle of Food of All Nations, 10 minutes before closing, looking at the very expensive coffee options. $17 later, I’m back in our kitchen, prepping tomorrow’s batch while blasting 2012 Lumineers. Having solved the coffee problem, I went to get ready for bed.

All houses have funny quirks and we’re learning that this one has a highly connected neural  network of exhaust fans. So when the coffee pot — situated next to our stove exhaust — turns on in the morning, you can smell it not only in the laundry room but also very distinctly when you’re taking a shower (slightly disconcerting when a frittata blends with your jasmine and rose conditioner, but I’m not against it). This also happens when you’re brushing your teeth late at night, still with the “Stubborn Love” headphones in, and you realize that not only did you prepare tomorrow’s coffee but you also pressed the on button.

“Hey what’s that smell?” G yelled from the office, her headphones blasting Armchair Expert.

I sprinted downstairs, drooling toothpaste like a rabid dog, but I still couldn’t stop the brew. 6 cups of very expensive coffee awaited me. It was a stupid mistake, easily preventable for many reasons (listening to less nostalgic Lumineers chief among them), but the easiest thing I could have done was deal with my “energy vampires” ahead of time. Then this never would have happened.

At that point, G had come down to see what all the commotion was. 

“So, can I interest you in a midnight cortado?”

Hate to break it to ya babe, but every appliance and piece of technology you plug into an outlet ends up leaking energy, even when you’re not using it, even when it’s turned off. That includes big stuff like AC units, hot water heaters, and fridges, as well as TVs, speakers, stereos, hair dryers, microwaves, you name it. Coffee makers too.

And all that vampire feeding actually can add up to 10% to 15% of your household energy usage. According to the Berkeley Lab, all that “standby power” also translates to 1% of global carbon emissions. Kinda crazy because the aviation industry accounts for 2.5% of global carbon emissions.

Anyway, the good news is that our tech is getting more efficient and energy vampires are individually sucking up less energy while they’re idling (although most of us now are drowning in orphaned Apple bricks so we’re likely using more energy overall).

For example:

That’s a big difference, but to really put that into perspective, a clothes dryer uses 1,500-5,000 watts of electricity per hour, so we’re talking tiny numbers here. 

The issue is that cumulatively (every night, every day, all year round) those 7.4 watts/hour add up. And perhaps if you are like me and have literally never turned off your laptop, that’s another 1.6 watts/hr for at least 8 hours of Sleep Mode every day.

Which brings me to our coffee pot, the unsuspecting victim of this story.

The Coffee Maker was the first appliance G and I bought together, about a week into the pandemic when we got tired of cleaning out the French press three times every morning. And while Mr. Ricey (the rice maker) and Big Bertha (the KitchenAid) get unplugged and hidden in cabinets after every use, The Coffee Maker has stayed on the kitchen counter for five years running. 

(The household blender doesn’t have a nickname but it does always have the same conversation: “hey are you on a work call? No?” Turns on blender. “I’M GOING TO MAKE A SMOOTHIE REAL QUICK.”) Even that gets unplugged and put away.

The Coffee Maker has stayed on because it has a super helpful built-in clock, and when you unplug the machine after it brews, the clock resets and you have to hold down the Hour and Minute buttons for a long time. A small but irksome task.

So we just always keep it plugged in. This means sometimes you accidentally make 6 cups of coffee at midnight, and it also means we drain 0.95 watts of energy every hour it’s in standby mode. 

And it’s been in standby mode for 23 hours every day for roughly 1,825 days. If we round that to 1 watt per hour, that’s 41,975 watts total. Sorry!

If my math’s correct (always a toss up) keeping The Coffee Pot on pretty much always costs us roughly $5.88 every year. Significantly less than that late-night coffee package I had to run out and buy.

But if you have 20 energy vampires lurking in your house, those single digits add up. Estimates vary, but the consensus is that’s somewhere between $100 and $200 every year spent powering nothing. 

So unplugging things is better than a sharp stick in the eye. Here’s what you can easily unplug at night:

I’ve also started turning off my laptop at night, which is still a scary feeling to see my thousands of tabs disappear. But they come back in the morning, and I’m finding it’s a nice barrier between work and life.

Another pro tip is to use power strips for your computer, phone chargers, and other tech, so that instead of remembering to unplug everything you can just flick off the big red button with your big toe. (Proactively turning off your spouse’s power strip while you’re at it will come at great risk to your safety and wellbeing.)

Killing energy vampires isn’t going to save you thousands of dollars, nor is it going to solve the climate crisis BUT details matter, mostly because they compound over time. 

Will I turn off The Coffee Maker? Lol are you kidding. But I’m more than happy to power down my laptop every night and free up some counter space by shoving the toaster in a cabinet in the morning. So hey, small wins can have dual benefits. 

Plus, $100-$200 shaved off your Dominion bill can get you somewhere between 23 and 46 egg and bacon bagels at Bodos every year.