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Really? My combined refrigerator-freezer unit (Siemens iQ500 series) has a maximum power rating of 90W

You're going to have to provide a citation for that, because that's ridiculously tiny. I tried looking it up on Siemens' website but all they quote is yearly power consumption:

http://www.siemens-home.bsh-gr...

This one quotes 274kWh/yr, which works out to 31W if the thing were running continuously, which isn't how refrigerators work. Besides, that's a tiny unit and nothing at all like the stuff we have in the US. However, according to this site, power consumption for refrigerators (the US kind) has fallen dramatically since the turn of the millennium, and back in the 70s/80s they used to use 4-5 times as much power, so it's possible that it's no longer necessary to supply them with a large circuit. However, they probably continue to give them a separate circuit in the kitchen so that your fridge doesn't get turned off if you blow a breaker because of your blender or toaster (which is also more likely if the fridge is running and sharing that same circuit, as toasters for instance use a ridiculous amount of power).

I did manage to find this site which quotes 150-400W, which is a rather wide range, and doesn't cite and sources or any specific model at all.

Someone in this discussion says even a little dorm refrigerator will peg a 1500W inverter on start-up, even though the running power consumption is 84W (not much less than your figure for your much-larger unit, though the dorm fridge is likely not terribly efficient unlike a top-of-the-line Euro unit). So you need to consider that too: how much power does the fridge use when the compressor starts? It's likely very high, even though it probably lasts less than a second.

So yeah, it's quite likely that a 15A 1800W dedicated circuit is still necessary for a fridge just to handle the start-up current.

Check this handy guide. It's across the board cheaper to use natural gas in homes for appliances than electricity. BTW, I trust that source as I used to work with the author in the nineties and have followed him ever since then.

http://michaelbluejay.com/elec...

"In most homes the refrigerator is the second-largest user of electricity (13.7%), right after the air conditioner (14.1%)" mostly because they are old and inefficient.

Modern energy efficient refrigerators use ~425 to 600kWh / year.

You say a gaming rig draws ~350W "when fully spun up", I say my 2nd gen PS3 draws over 200W when sitting at the menu bar "doing nothing." The article is talking about gamers that never let their systems go to sleep, so let's settle on 300W draw while powered up, and figure your average gamer leaves his system on 24-7, so it doesn't have problems from thermal cycling, or whatever their excuse is - so:

300W running for 24x365 hours = 2600kWh, or about 5 "modern" refrigerators.

You may be interested to know that the full grand master title is granted automatically for women-only achievements* to make them look better.

I am well aware of this fact, and the link I provided earlier makes the distinction too: see the "How Earned" column in his table.

But there's only one issue with that...

How was that study conducted? Has it ever been reviewed by peers or successfully reproduced?

Screw Mars and Venus; men and women are from Earth

This would argue againstsegregation... But even that study shows ample differences between genders, and the article describing it (which is what you linked to) acknowledges ample earlier studies "that had shown significant, and often large, sex differences".

If you had a society where eating apples was something almost exclusively done by men

Most of the female chess Grand Masters (not to be confused with the WGMs) come from places, where views on gender-roles remain quite traditional — Georgia, China, Russia, or Ukraine.

This alone handily defeats the argument, that it is the dastardly "Victorian moral system", that keeps women from advancing in anything other than child-bearing and singing.

If a girl from Lviv can become a Grandmaster — her last opponent, incidentally, being a girl from Vladivostok, what is the excuse for a girl from Los Angeles? Sex-stereotypes are only wider-spread in the former USSR...

the very fact that historically there were fewer women in STEM (a legacy from the old Victorian moral system)

Citation needed.

Or, one can decide that having 50% of the human population having a solid interest in the sort of careers most valuable to the improvement of the human condition is a good thing

I'll see your 50% and raise it to 100%. You make even less sense with these slogan here, than you made earlier with attempts to remain scientific.

and maybe we should give a shot at remedying this

Rectifying what? Are there laws or even customs, that prevent girls from entering a STEM field and excelling in it? I am not aware of any such and I await your citations.

even if just on the "offchance" that it's not biological

But what if it is bilogicial — as seems perfectly probable? Would not your efforts to encourage people to do, what they have little aptitude towards, then be wasteful and, indeed, detrimental to that "improvement of the human condition"?

One of the possible reasons why girls don't get into tech stuff may be peer pressure from other girls before they even graduate from high school.

Or, maybe, women and men simply aren't the same?

The anatomy and physiology are demonstrably different. Could those natural differences be having an effect on the interests in life? Feminists would like us to think, all of that is due solely to upbringing, but they offer no evidence — while denouncing detractors as "sexists" themselves.

Though businesses aren't allowed to discriminate, sports-leagues openly do all the time. A "co-ed" volleyball team, for example, must have at least two females out of six players at all times — because having more males is an advantage. A team showing up with only one woman is penalized one way or the other (see rule 11 of this set, for example), a team showing up for a coed game without any women automatically loses.

In chess too, for some reason, there are very few female Grandmasters (GMs). It got so embarrassing, a lesser title of Woman Grandmaster (WGM) was introduced... And there are some — but very few (all of them from countries with "traditional" views on gender-roles, BTW).

Now, I am not going to claim, women are intrinsically "inferior" to men — for a I don't think, the sexes are comparable, nor do they have to compete. We represent the same species. But we are certainly different — and I am not surprised, if the difference is manifested in aptitude for or interest in different carriers and pursuits.

Even assuming an electric stove (I've always used gas) the electricity cost is less than $100/year so I don't know where this comment is coming from.

http://michaelbluejay.com/elec...

Allow me to say, "LOL, 5000 BTU."

That's a window-mounted cooler, suitable for cooling an area, as mentioned in the linked Amazon page, of 150 square feet.

Your numbers don't match real-world use.

http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/howmuch.html

This website tells me that a 2.5 ton residential AC running 24/7 at 9c/kWh costs me $234/mo. Since a residential electric bill here in Arizona can rise by $300 easily ($10 a day) in Phoenix during the summer, I know, for a fact, that those numbers are generous and ignore SEER.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_energy_efficiency_ratio

Regardless, unless your utility bill averages $1.50 a day or so, you can't possibly power your house for "many days" like ZorinLynx pulled out of his ass.

If your power bill is ~$150/mo, and you had a super-efficient way to get the power back out of the Tesla's battery to your AC appliances, you could power your house for A DAY -- which is about the time it took to charge it on a residential charger to begin with.

Cooking dinner generally isn't a big user of power compared to the normal running of the house.

According to this graph electrical cooking is a significant user of electricity. It is the 5th largest user of electricity in the average home ( ones that do not have hot tubs, pools or water beds).

put the laundry on a clothes line outside

While cloths line drying is a great idea there are a few issues with it;
1. It does not work well when raining.
2. Does not work well for apartment dwellers. I have no place at all to line dry my cloths unless I want to hang them in my small apartment which is not a viable solution.
3. Takes a lot of time especially in low temperatures. The average city dweller is not willing to wait hours for their cloths to dry.
4. Does not work well in cities where pollution levels, bird droppings, etc may make the cloths as dirty as before they went into the washer.

The big solar thermal plant in Arizona is selling electricity at $.14/kWh .

That's more than the US average of 12 cents, but it's still a few cents, and not dollars. Going forward, it's going to be competitive.

And nuclear doesn't include the cost of waste disposal, and coal doesn't include other external costs.

Also, see those pointy things at the front of your mouth? The ones maladapted to 100% plant consumption?

This is a myth. Our so-called "canine teeth" are "canine" in name only. Other plant-eaters (like gorillas, horses, and hippos) have "canines", and chimps, who are almost exclusively vegan, have massive canines compared to ours. Our early ancestors from at least four million years ago were almost exclusively vegetarian, later to become scavengers eating carrion and then hunters with Homo Erectus, making meat a part of the diet. Hunting is hard work - they only did it because of a lack of other options, often at certain times of year. Compare that to the couch-squatting meat eater of today that feels akin to the great hunter of old.. Pretty silly really, especially given that agriculture (now consuming some 26% of all land area on earh) was invented just 10,000 years ago.

All omnivorism means we're capable of eating meat (useful from a survival standpoint if that's all that's available), but our bodies aren't geared for it to be a normal, significant part of our diets. (from here

You eat meat because you like it and you don't have to kill it yourself. There's no other reason to eat meat - there's no evidence to suggest that it's a vital part of a human's diet.

As someone that grew up on a small farm trained in killing the animals I ate, I can say I doubt most meat eaters would have the guts to really get behind their precious meat diet anyway - blubbering with guilt in no time. We had tough kids from the city staying with us that would run away screaming, hands over their ears, when we slit the throat of a pig.

In modern times, meat is just a dietary fetish gone horribly wrong.

Oh, and that last link to fao.org said NOTHING about renal/kidney failure (neither word occurs anywhere), and nothing about the hazards of excess protein consumption. (It did refer to excess fat consumption)

Indeed, I meant to add another link in there. Too hasty! Here you go.

I'd be surprised if portable devices account for even 0.1% of household energy usage.

Maybe you should actually look into it rather than just making wild guesses? Here, I'll even do some of the work for you; 30 seconds of Googling finds:

This one estimates at 15-19%

And this one at about 10%

So it looks like you're at least 2 orders of magnitude off... But I guess completely uneducated guesses count as "insightful" these days.

--Jeremy

> You do realize that computers use electricity, right?

Yes they do but not that much. Here's some perspective:

A desktop computer (minus display) uses about 100W. If you leave it on all the time that's 2.4kWh per day. If only 8 hours, that's 0.8kWh.
Add a 22" LCD panel for another 55W. 155W * 8 hours a day = 1.24kWh. Note: you can get most modern PCs and displays to go to "energy saver" mode when idle, so they can use even less power.

Contrast:
A single fluorescent tube lamp uses about 40W.
A Desk/stand fan uses about 50W.
A fridge uses about 100W on average.
A typical room airconditioner/heater uses about 1000 to 1500W peak (how much on average depends on your temp setting, but it's usually bad in terms of energy consumption).
Microwave ovens, toasters, hair dryers also use about 1000W when running.
A "proper" electric oven uses about 2500 to 7000W. Roast/bake something for an hour and it'll use more than running a PC for 8 hours.
Washing machines can use about 2kWh per load ( http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/laundry.html ).
And clothes dryers? They use 4kW or so.

A Tesla Roadster has a 53kWh battery and a range of about 350km. That makes it about 7km per kWh. Including charging losses, Tesla state the overall plug-to-wheel efficiency is 0.128 kWh/km. I guess that excludes stuff like in-car airconditioning and heating ;).

That means just driving an electric car to work 10km away will use more electricity than running a PC+LCD for 24 hours.

And after driving 10km to the office, most people will end up working on a computer anyway. So if the fibreoptic stuff allow more people to work from home, it'll actually save a lot more energy.

Lastly: 1 litre of petrol contains about 34 megajoules. That's 9.4 kilowatt hours. A small car's fuel tank can typically hold about 40-50 litres. Yes that's not electricity but if you don't use an electric vehicle to get to work, you'll probably be burning petroleum.

and how much energy goes into tossing the "old" stuff into the trash and creating all new?

If he was building his first server and trying to make it as efficient as possible I'd be all for it, but tossing what works to buy all new just to save a few watts is a waste. Besides a 100w server is already pretty efficient given our current technology, only way he would beat that is going with a laptop which typically draw 15 to 45 watts.

Chevy Volt does 40 miles per charge, so figure 2 charges a day (to work/from work) and 20 working days per month == 1600 miles which is 600 kilowatthours for a typical EV. Multiply by 15 cents per KWh == about $87 per month for electricity.

Most people don't drive 80 miles roundtrip to work and where are you getting 15 cents per kilowatt-hour from? According to the map on this site there's only one US State that comes close to that price.

When really close to zero cost pirating just isn't "free" enough for you. Based on: http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/computers.html running a gaming rig 24/7 costs about $400 per year. But ~ a third of that would be during normal usage time so would be spent any ways, so roughly $266 per year for the overnight running. I think I'm willing to pay less than $1 a day for the amount I can pirate (or feed a child in africa). Still it will save you money in the long run, just not a drastic need.

*cough* Hmm, sounds interesting, but don't current US customers pay 5-20cents per kWh?

I'm just gonna set this down and back away while people flame me for endorsing coal/oil/nuclear based electricity.

Or using your analogy. The tests that the oven may blow up but save 50% on the energy bill has been shown that the net benefit is on the side of the oven that may potentially blow up!

How so? The average yearly cost of an oven is $42. You're telling me that you'd accept the risk of injury, possibly death to save $21 a year?

From my experience, most people don't have a cage, or even a rack full of servers that can sustain the loss of a single server going down.

Most don't even run at more than 40% utilization and the performance is not that important.

What is important is that their system is reliable and that they don't have to waste time rebuilding it.

The server and the operating system should just work. I'm more an application developer than anything else. That's were most of my time is spent. What I know about servers and operating systems I learned so that I can put my applications on something I don't have to worry about. A server being down means loss of revenue.

In most cases, it's cheaper to buy a faster cpu, faster disks, use raid 10 than it is to suffer any significant downtime.

For rough estimates, that sounds about right. I get 72MJ for a round trip, which converts to 20kWh. So I'd say you've got it. :)

Worst case, add about 50% on to that to cover unexpected usage. (e.g. Hitting a lot of stop lights. Going to the grocery store. etc.) That would give you about a 600kWh usage per month. You can use this chart to figure out what your monthly "fuel" bill would be. Using California as an estimate, the cost for 600kWh would work out to (600 * 0.12) $72/month. Not too shabby.

If you live somewhere less expensive, like the nuclear powered Illinois, you could have a bill as low as ~$50/mo.

No matter how we choose to generate power in the future, we have very few options for switching to anything other than gasoline for transporting that power.

Gasoline has a fantastic energy density. A 14 gallon tank of the stuff contains 491.2 kilowatt-hours of energy ($68 in electricity at New York rates), and the gasoline itself only weighs 81 pounds. If you fill up the tank in five minutes, you're transferring power at 7.368 megawatts. Can you imagine what kind of electrical infrastructure you would need to transfer the same power over mere wires?

About the only alternative I can imagine that would be comparable would be to hot-swap whole huge batteries at gas stations.

No, I think we'll be using gasoline, or at least a similar liquid fuel, for quite a while.

Where? Not in America

I don't know what part of America you live in, but in Canada it is legal for a woman to be topfree anywhere it is legal for a man to be.

Here's a page that discusses Nudity and the Law in Austin TX.

If you are curious about whether women and men enjoy equal rights regarding being topfree in public where you live, you might find this link helpful.

After you figure out your kWh usage for your respective devices, this kWh cost calculator is useful for finding out how much it costs to run it during a period of time.

I leave my computer on all the time. I highballed its power usage at 200 watts to factor in the speakers, monitor, and computer itself (the monitor is not on all the time, but the computer is nowhere near 200 watts - so I just did a rough estimate.

You would also want to find out much a kWh costs in your state to plug in the correct values. I set it up for $0.11 a kWh, also a big higher estimate.

My father insisted that my computer was the reason the power bill was over $200 one month. It's nice to be able to tell him that it only costs about $15 a month to use. (:

I've done a few tests with various units (Comcast DVR, Tivo, Myth box) and found there is about a 150W difference between home-brew and embedded. .150kW * 24 hr * 365 days * $.15 kWh / 12 mo = $16.425 / mo

Firstly, I don't know how you can say that, considering "home brewed" systems vary.

Second, according to http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/cost.html , "The average cost of residential electricity was 9.86/kWh in the U.S. in March 2006." The 3 highest rates rates were "12 in California, 14.314 in New York, and 16.734 in Hawaii." So, your "$.15 kWh" figure is potentially WAY off.

3rd, You'd still be wrong- PCs have Power Saving features built into them. A simple Suspend or Hibernate can make the power requirement drop to near zero. This would affect the monthly power requirement in unpredictable ways- a single person who sleeps 8 hrs a day, and works 8 hrs a day could have their TVPC (heh, I made that up. Sounds friendlier than 'HTPC') essentially powered off for 16 hours a day. Or thay could actually power it off (unless a recording session is planned). A busy family with kids might have the TVPC up and running playing/recording kids shows all day long, and recording shows for the adults (plural) all evening/night.

According to the DOE, 2001 energy use was 13,290 billion kWh. Average cost of residential electricity was roughly ten cents per kWh. So the world electric bill was $1.329 trillion, making a lot of assumptions.

Step 1: Take a price from this map.
Step 2: Multiple that price times 2,000.

So for California, 2,000kWh would cost $240 per hour to run. That's $5,760/day, $40,320/week, and a whopping $2,096,640/year!

Of course, for diesel your prices may be higher. As of right now, diesel is approximately $2.669 per gallon in California. To compute the costs, you'd need to know how efficient the generator is. This page claims "approaching 40%", so we can use that for a guesstimate. At about 146,520,000 joules per gallon of diesel, we can compute a need of 122.85 gallons per hour. At the going rate, it would cost ~$327.89/hour to run a 2MW generator.

"... all TV and VCR that are turned off cost Americans nearly a billion dollars a year in electricity."

"[One study estimated] that the phantom load from TV's alone was equal to the output of a Chernobyl sized power plant. "

"There is no question that rolling blackouts could have been avoided if Californians cut their dryer use in half. Heck, it would only take something like a 10% reduction in electrical use across the country to shut down half of the nuclear power plants."

According to this page (found via google for "cost of electricity").

http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/cost.html

"The average cost of residential electricity was 9.86/kWh in the U.S. in March 2006."

The fee charged by Cow Power is 4 cents per kilowatt hour. That makes the price almost, but not quite, 40% higher. The 4 cents also does NOT go to the farmers. That goes to Cow Power. The farmers presumably get market price for the electricity, minus a commission for Cow Power, presumably. Chances are, after the capital expenditures (cost of generators and methane collection equipment) and maintainence costs, they won't make any money on this either. Cow Power are presumably the only ones who would make money on this deal, since they seem to just be brokers for the selling of this power.

According to the page you linked, the average cost per KWh is approximately 9 cents (and I, as a lucky New Yorker, pay almost 24 cents). The average consumption is much higher. According to this page, the average usage per year is 10,215 KWh per year, or roughly 28 per day .. thus, if you're using only 9 per day, you're significantly below the national average. According to my electric bill, I use 3 KWh per day.

Hmmm... Having a fairly beefy computer and dual LCD monitors I thought I would go lookup what some of my other appliances around my house pull for comparison.

According to:

http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/howmuch.html

Oven: 5000 Watts
Clothes Dryer: 5000 Watts
Water Heater: 3800 Watts
Air Conditioner: 3500 Watts
Microwave: 1500 Watts
Refrigerator: 500 Watts (mine is fairly large)
32" TV: 150 Watts (Estimate)

My Computer at Idle: 150 Watts
My Computer While Playing a game: 350 Watts

Now I'm too lazy to do the math.... but it's fairly apparent to me atleast that the computer is just going to be a drop in the bucket compared to the refrigerator, air condition (or heater), and water heater all of which run for a considerable amount of time during the day.

So even though 400W seems like a lot... it _really_ isn't. Plus... it isn't at 400W very often (atleast not unless you're a teenager with nothing better to do.... but then _you're_ not responsible for the bills either ;-) most of the time it's going to hum along at around 150 Watts or even be powered off for a lot of people (mine is on 24/7).

Friedmud

The average computer uses as much as seventeen swimming pools worth of coal to run on any given day.

1 ton of coal produces 2,500 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity
1 pound of coal produces 1.25 kilowatt-hours

From:
http://www.teachcoal.org/lessonplans/how_much.html

It looks like an hour of active computer use should use no more than 200 watt-hours in an hour.

From:
http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/computers.ht ml

200 X 24 = 4800 = 4.8kwh/day = Under 4 lbs. of coal.

I think the grandparent post got the words "day" and "year" mixed up. Easy mistake. Half the time I get carded, I tell the bartender I'm 22 days old.

The reason I believe this is because electronics in peoples homes are growing at a faster rate than "green technology" (like solar power) is improving.
The amount of solar panels required to power the 3 computers, 4 TV's, 2 PlayStations, DVRs, cordless phones, etc. in my house in cloudy/rainy NY would be crushing.

It's not your home computer equipment that sucking up all those kilowatts, it's the electrical appliances you take for granted. We once stayed in a rural cottage with a 5 kilowatt trip switch - any time the energy demands exceeded this limit, the main fuse would cut off.

Our morning would begin with putting the laundry into the washing machine(3 kW/h), switching on the kettle (2kW/h). By lunchtime, the cooker would be on (3kW/h), and the washing machine would now be in spin mode (2kW/h). Not forgetting the television (300 watts), refrigerator (500 watts), and a computer (120 watts), and maybe a couple of light bulbs (100 watts x 2).

Needless to say, our power supply was tripping out more often than hippies at a summer festival. A short term measure was that we had to switch off all lights and appliances whenever the cooker or washing machine was on. The long term solution was that the trip switch was upgraded to 9 kilowatts.

For 3 computers, 4 TV's, 2 playstations, DVR, the power demand would be an additional:

3 x computer . .= 3 x 200 watts = 600
4 x TV . . . . .= 4 x 80 watts = 320
2 x playstation = 2 x 80 watts = 160
2 x DVR. . . . .= 2 x 120 watts = 240
3 x cordless phones = 3 x 5 watts = 15
Total = 600 + 320 + 160 + 240 + 15 = 1335 kilowatts

Sources: Energy Efficiency Guide, Energy Whiz and Saving Electricity

It is perfectly natural for us to eat meat, as it is for many other species.

Bzzt! Wrong. Humans are Not Designed to Eat Meat. I eat meat - and happily so - but that doesn't make your reasoning correct.

Do an experiment. Turn everything in your house off and go find the electricity meter. Turn on each thing in your house individually and check the speed of the dial in the meter for each one

There a few websites (check out section three) out there that tell you how to use your electric meter (assuming it's an analog type with dials) to figure out how much power you are using at any given time. I can't use this at my house because I have a digital meter (LCD display only -- no wheel or dials) but it seems logical.

It basically means finding out the "Kh factor" on your meter (it should be printed on the faceplate somewhere) and counting how many seconds it takes for the wheel to make one complete revolution. Then use the following formula: (((3.6 x Kh factor) / seconds) x 1000). That'll give you an approximation of how many watts of power your house is using at any one moment. If you are a true geek or have nothing better to do you can turn off everything in the house and turn items on one at a time to figure out how much they draw -- or drop the $40 on a meter such as this one.

If you really want to get detailed you can start reading your meter and keep a log in a spreadsheet or database. Yes I'm do this -- I'm a geek.