See the murky world of vampire appliances captured on camera

By Gege Li

Photographer Alessio Perboni

THESE are night-time scenes as you have never seen them before. Using long-exposure techniques and only the illumination from LEDs on household and office devices on standby, such as TVs and computer monitors, photographer Alessio Perboni, based in Milan, Italy, casts the everyday in a new light.

These images are part of a photo project that is under development by Perboni called Stand-by. The Wasted Month, which will highlight the energetic cost of keeping devices on standby instead of switching them off completely.

There are many estimates of the amount of energy used during standby, sometimes referred to as “vampire power”. One study of around 1300 homes in the European Union, for example, found that standby energy use amounted to about 7 per cent of a household’s total energy consumption.

With energy prices on the rise in many parts of the world, Perboni says he wanted to highlight the importance of this “seemingly invisible and negligible” problem. In fact, as the name of his project points out, the standby energy wasted in a typical home in a higher-income country in a year could power that same building for about a month.