Home appliance energy usage

The Smart Grid will help to balance energy production and consumption.
While we are waiting for the Smart Grid to come, there is something we can do meanwhile - optimizing the energy usage of our local network of electrical appliances. Because one thing is for sure: energy does not come for free now and won't come for free in the future either.
When doing optimization, the important thing is to identify the parts of a system, where an optimization significantly affects the overall outcome. In the blog of the General Electric Company, you can find a nice interactive visualization of the power consumption for a selectable set of typical appliances.

A zero-Watt cloth dryer
(source:Wikimedia commons)

The website application tries to guess power consumption and cost of your set of appliances. While the values are just rough estimates, the numbers still give you a feeling for appliances which are expensive in terms of energy consuming and appliances which are more frugal.

I personally was quite surprised by the high power consumption of an electrical cloth dryer. Luckily, I have the zero-Watt edition at home :-)