Last week, The Herald-Times of Bloomington, Ind., reported on a 10-year-old boy who found a way for Madison County, Ind., to save $25,000 a year.

Young Wynn Brower apparently started his research for a science fair, figuring out his family could save a dollar a day by unplugging their computers at night. At the urging of his father, who works in technical services for Madison County, Wynn did a little more math, extrapolating that the county could save $25,000 a year by unplugging its 500-plus computers every night.

The savings might end up being a little less than Wynn predicted, since the county’s computers need to stay on one night a week for upgrades. Still, unplugging your computers and televisions — at night or when they are not going to be used for hours at a time — is one of the easiest things you can do to reduce your carbon footprint, the measure of greenhouse gases produced by human activities.

Computers, televisions, cable boxes, and every appliance that comes with a clock continue to draw power even when turned off. This “standby” mode is what allows your TV to turn on so quickly and what allows anything that uses a remote to be “remote ready.” It also sucks power, wasting energy and costing you money.

Lowering your bill for “vampire power” can be as simple as pulling the plug. Grouping your computer equipment or your home entertainment systems into a power strip or surge protector can make it easy to cut power to the works when you’re done using them.

Estimates on how much power different appliances use vary widely. (I found an Ohio Consumers’ Counsel report that said a computer and monitor in “sleep” mode can use 28 watts of power. And I found a PC technical hardware site that estimated it at less that 2 watts.) The consensus seems to be that the amount of power used by your microwave’s digital clock is pretty negligible. And that the real power hogs are your computer and television accessories: the HD converter box, the cable converter box, the cable modem, the computer speakers.

Some electronics waste a lot of power because we tend to leave them on. Leaving your laser printer on “ready” is the same as running it all the time. Computer speakers don’t need to be on if you’re not actually listening to something. Unplug your cellphone charger if it’s not actually charging something.

For more ideas on eliminating power vampires, click here.

Have you found a way to cut your power bill? Post suggestions below, or email greenpoint@dailygazette.net.