Bill wrote:
This thread has seemed to hit a nerve!

Why are so many people getting upset that I am working to eliminate "vampire
loads" in my house and reduce my electric bill?

Anyway here are the facts about "vampire power" for those who are interested
in this (can be 5% of your electric bill and 75% of the power for electronic
things is used while the devices are turned off!)....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standby_power


Many years ago when I started working on
electronic devices, I worked in a TV repair
shop when television sets had tubes, not
just a picture tube but the whole freaking
chassis. The heat put out by an old tube
type TV set was enough to keep a small
house warm. There was a considerable wait
for the dinosaur video displays to come to
life because all those tubes had to warm up.
As a convenience feature, manufacturers
added a feature called "instant on". This
kept all those tube filaments warm with
partial power. I imagine the standby power
for the old sets would be enough to run more
than several modern televisions. One of the
TV manufacturers held a seminar in town for
all of their dealers where they showed off
the new line of televisions that had the new
fangled switching power supplies that allowed
a solid state transistorized TV to operate
on less than a hundred watts of power and when
the incoming line voltage dropped as low as 80
volts AC. It was an impressive demonstration
on that day 35 years ago.

TDD