Is this thing off? Is it completely off?
Back in the "electromechanical" days, when you turned off an applicance, it was off. Completely off, no power drawn from the socket. These days, we have microwaves with clocks, TVs that wake up to a press on a remote, and a half dozen chargers for as many gadgets. They all draw power, all the time, even when they seem to be off. Many draw as much 10-20 watt, and an average California home draws 67 W, equivalent to leaving a light bulb on 24/7, and producing a noticable percentage (5-26%) of the homes' energy consumption. Interesting factoid: "while heating food requires more than 100 times as much power as running the clock, most microwave ovens stand idle more than 99% of the time"--and thus "a typical microwave oven consumes more electricity powering its digital clock than it does heating food" [Economist].

In an usually aggressive energy conservation move, Bush signed an executive order after the 2001 California energy crisis mandating that all electronics bought by federal agencies must use no more than 1W of standby power. The State of California followed suit with regulations limiting standby power draw for consumer electronics to 0.5W by 2008. Applying such measures "across the developed nations of the OECD would reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by nearly 0.5%—'equivalent to removing more than 18m cars from European roads.'"

I had been wondering if I should be more vigilent in unplugging chargers when the gadget isn't attached, and after reading the article I'm momentarily motivated to find out how much power various gadgets in my house draw. Then I realised: the biggest change I could make, without a doubt, is to not have my PC turned on 24/7; I bet that guy draws 50W+ whenever it's on.

I did find the manufacturer of the power meters used in many of these studies, but haven't yet found a price. I did find a consumer power meter: the Kill-a-Watt (ha, ha!), $27 on Amazon with free shipping or $17 on eBay with $10 shipping.

The standby power draw piece was one of several very interesting articles in the Economist's special section on technology--you can find links to the others in the sidebar: articles on innovation in wind power turbines, the rise of flash memory, metro-wide wifi networks, etc.