Electronic gadgets fill our days. At work, I typically carry a pager, a work cell phone and my personal cell phone. And at some point all those devices need to be charged.

Obviously, that uses electricity. What many of us don’t recognize that once our favorite devices are done charging and we unplug them for use, the charger is still drawing electricity from the wall socket. Electricity is being thrown away, just like a leaky faucet wastes water.

Checking in with the conservation specialists at Seattle City Light, Seattle's publicly owned utility where I work, I learned that a charger draws 1 to 2 watts of energy when it’s plugged in, whether anything is connected to it or not. Over the course of a year, an unused charger will use about 8.7 kilowatt-hours of electricity. At City Light’s low rates, that still adds up to 69 cents.

So I took a look around my house and found eight chargers for cell phones and Bluetooth headsets plugged in to a wall socket. It had obviously been more convenient for me to leave them plugged in.

By the end of the year, that convenience was going to cost me $5.52. Knowing that I’d score a lot more points with my wife by using that money to buy her a latte at Starbucks, I started to de-fang those energy vampires. I found two more at my office and am now sharing the word with others on this easy energy-saving step. So the one thing THIS SPACE is recommending as a way to save energy and a little money is to cut off your power-draining gadget chargers when they’re not in use.

There are two approaches to consider.

The direct approach, which is to simply unplug them when you’re done.

Or, if you’re like me and constantly pressed for time so those conveniences are important, hook them up to a power strip. When you’re done, use the switch on the power strip to shut the chargers down.

It’s a little less effective because all the chargers will be drawing when you turn the power strip on to charge your first device, but you’ll still cut off hours and hours of wasted electricity without totally sacrificing convenience.

You’re going to make a positive difference for the planet by reducing your energy consumption without losing any productive electricity use. And you’ll have a few extra bucks in your wallet to buy that Venti iced vanilla latte.