KEY POINTS:
Despite clicking on to energy-efficient light bulbs, fancy heat pumps, dehumidifiers, and "Energy Star"-rated whiteware, Kiwis, it seems, are wasting more power than ever.
TVs are getting bigger and hungrier; gadgets are overtaking living rooms; and we have a problem letting go of knackered, yet power-hungry old fridges.
Appliances left on standby cost us $100 million every year, according to the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority.
EECA's production manager Terry Collins will that swear he's not a power Nazi.
But he said it was not only power company price hikes that were pushing up monthly bills.
Common power-munching villains were the beer fridge, giant plasma TVs and flash home entertainment systems with the works - especially if left on standby.
Respectively they added about $16, $17 and $30 to the monthly household electricity bill, Collins said.
"We have three million fridges in the country, for 1.5 million households."
Old fridges sat underused in sheds and garages nationwide, Collins said. Householders didn't realise how much power was wasted, and that they could save at least $100 a year by getting rid of an old, energy-inefficient beer fridge.
He said turning appliances off at the wall saved up to 10 per cent on the power bill.
Doing so did not damage the appliance, or use more electricity: "That's a big urban myth."
Collins said the range of electrical appliances Kiwis could "plug in" had doubled over the past 30 years, and was now impacting on power bills as families accumulated more and more electrical goods.
"In 1977, we had one TV, half of us had a vacuum cleaner, and there was an electric bar heater.
"We had a fridge, a washing machine, a toaster and a lamp. The hi-fi system was a turntable."
Today people had DVD players, video players, electric toothbrushes, mobile phones, PCs, answering machines, games consoles, faxes, printers, not to mention bigger and cheaper plasma and LCD screen televisions. Some TVs used more than twice as much power as a small family fridge, Collins said.
He said people should be aware of the running costs of an appliance before they bought it.
"The consumption of a large plasma TV now is roughly double that of what all the home electronic products in our houses used to be just over five years ago."
While hot water was still the biggest drain on power in a typical household, accounting for about 38 per cent of the bill, by 2020, home entertainment products were expected to surpass that and account for up to 45 per cent.
People also left their TVs on for considerably longer periods of time, he added.
"They are not actually watching it, but have it on for background music, it's replacing the radio."
Fan heaters were atrocious on power. A large machine (2400 watts) could use up to 43 cents of electricity an hour.
Leaving it on four hours a day for each month would set you back more than $50.
Collins said good quality heat pumps could be relatively efficient, although it was necessary to ensure your house first had good insulation.
Meanwhile, he said, if we all left our mobile chargers plugged in (without the phone connected) collectively we would waste $7500 a day.
Yet the mounting bills can't all be blamed on gadgets.
Electricity charges have been creeping up. The major power companies reported average household bill increases of between 3.5 and 8 per cent since this time last year. Figures are higher in some regions where lines charges have jumped.
Bill size varies around the country. The further south you go, the more you could expect to pay, said Alan Seay, spokesman for Meridian Energy. That was of course due to colder temperatures and higher usage.
Consumers Institute chief executive Sue Chetwin believed household power prices were too high.
"If you look at the last five to 10 years, prices have gone up for consumers rapidly. But for industrial or commercial customers they have flatlined or dropped."
Residential electricity prices had risen 40 per cent above inflation in the past six years.
An institute-run website - www.powerswitch.org.nz - allowed people to compare rates from different companies using details from their current bill, to see if there was a better deal available, she said.
The site attracted 20,000 unique hits last month.
