Every day we walk past energy vampires, sucking away on our power supply, and most of us don’t even know it.

Cars left running or huge buildings with their lights glowing all night are obvious wasteful consumers of energy, but many times it is actually smaller and less noticeable power consumers that are – when aggregated across hundreds of millions of homes and offices – adding significant strain onto the US power production and transmission system at a time when blackouts are creating real concerns for companies relying on constant power supply.

Utility customers face a “perfect storm” of sharply higher bills for electricity and natural gas because trillions of dollars in capital expenditure will be needed to upgrade aging US infrastructure and comply with environmental rules, the head of America’s utility regulators’ association told Breaking Energy earlier this year.

The total sum came to roughly $4 trillion, an amount that could be diminished or better structured if demand growth was better controlled.

Do you know which power use habits you have continue to feed energy vampires? Check out the slideshow below of America’s top energy vampires to identify your problem areas, and discover easy solutions.