As Dandy Don Meredith said so well, so long ago - "Turn out the lights, the party's over..."
You may turn out the lights, but the electricity bill is still mounting.
It's there - sitting quietly on your kitchen counter - the microwave. It's off...or is it?
"Electricity can be really sneaky because you may have it plugged in and it's off, but it's still sucking energy and they call that phantom loads," explains Ivory McLintock with the Blue Planet Foundation.
Whether it's the microwave or a laptop computer, the fact is - if it's plugged in, it's still drawing electricity.
"When you have something plugged in like let's say, you're cell phone charger. And even though your cell phone is not plugged into it, you can still feel the heat coming out of it, you still see the little light on it," McLintock says.
And this electric fact of life doesn't just apply to small appliances.
"It's every appliance that's kept plugged in. If you think about it, you're leaving it plugged in 24 hours a day, 7 days a week - 365 days a year, that's all sucking out a lot of energy," McLintock says.
How do you measure the amount of "phantom loads" - secret electricity your appliances are using? There is one certain way to find out. That's by plugging in the Belkin energy monitor.
"This actually measures it turned on and turned off. But this is the Belkin energy monitor and this will show you , you plugged into the wall and it will show you how much energy your appliance is sucking up," McLintock says.
The ultimate question is - how much energy is being used while you are asleep? How much of a "phantom load" is going on at your house?
"It's going to be different for everybody because some households have a lot of TVs, some households use the washer dryer, some households just have a washer, so it's going to be different for every household," McLintock says.
