I don’t think there is such a thing as a darkened room in the 21st century. A quick glance around any household reveals enough blinking lights to rival the stars in the sky. Nearly every gadget plugged into the walls is busy sucking energy from the sockets and money from your wallet even while you aren’t using them.

We often forget these energy vampires, overlooking their usage, but in an effort to be a greener consumer and more budget-conscious, there is a fun way to figure out what items should be unplugged when not in use. The DIY EnerJar Kit measures how much energy an item that is not in use, but still plugged in, pulls and also can show the usage when the item is active.

The energy meter can be made without an engineering degree. Even better, the jar that contains the kit can be pulled from the trash bin or claimed the next time you clean out your fridge. Using commonly available items scavenged from around the house, it doesn’t take a mad scientist to put the do-it-yourself kit together.

Once assembled the EnerJar is plugged into the wall. Then everything from game consoles to computer monitors to electric toothbrushes to rechargable battery packs can be plugged into the EnerJar. An LED readout inside the glass container displays how much energy the vampire product is sucking while at rest or in use. The numbers will likely surprise you.

The schematics for the gadget Matt Meshulam and Zach Dwiel created, which has won a design competition, can be downloaded for free.

For more on the EnerJar and other green gadgets, head to Inhabitat.

Image: The Power Alley

Tags: energy meter, DIY, EnerJar, green, energy use

Margaret O’Callaghan had a need for a new type of kitchen utensil.  The round-bottomed ladle and the spatula are just not good enough when you’re dealing with things like crock pots and serving dishes.  That’s why she invented the scrudle, a combination ladle and spatula designed to scrape the deliciousness from any sort of cooking […]

Every day, Tom Baker deals with the issue of traffic.  Given Southern California’s massive concentration of cars, it’s no wonder that Baker would get frustrated dealing with the daily traffic routine.  That inspiration resulted in these great images of Los Angeles without the cars.   Here’s the full image gallery, and it’s awesome.
I love the […]

Have you ever wondered where salt comes from?  I mean, salt is in everything from fertilizers (potassium chloride) to the dinner table (sodium chloride), but where does it actually come from?  Why, salt mines, of course!  They’re not just for horrible industrial accidents or mad scientist lairs anymore.  English Russia has a great look inside […]

For some reason, the kids these days love the Twilight saga.  Believe me, it pains me to call it the Twilight saga, because to me a saga is a great, sweeping work of masterful literature, not a teenage vampire romance novel.  Either way, the latest movie based on the Twilight books, New Moon (officially The […]

People worry about all kinds of crises as the world ends, but as the movie Zombieland taught us, sometimes it’s our snack foods that are most important to our happiness.  For Tallahassee, it was his beloved Hostess Twinkies.  If your favorite food is the humble Eggo waffle from General Mills, then you’d best head to […]

I love goofy little websites like this.  From the Wal-Martians to quality engineering, I love a nice, odd corner of the Internet to investigate.  If it’s something that can result in some comedy thanks to random word generation, even better.   That’s why when Mysterio offered to predict my holiday gifts, I jumped at the […]

Linguist d’Armond Speers is an odd bird.  How else could you explain someone that taught his son Klingon as his first language? For the first three years of his son’s life, Speers spoke to his son only in the fictional alien language Klingon from the Star Trek universe.  His reasoning?  It was an experiment to […]