Slashdot Mirror
Curbing Energy Use In Appliances That Are Off
KarmaOverDogma writes "The New York Times has an interesting piece on the slow but steady movement to reduce the power drain for appliances that are never truly turned off when they are powered down. In the typical house that's enough to light a 100-watt light bulb 24/7, according to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories, a research arm of the Energy Department. In the United States alone, over $1 billion per year is spent powering devices such as TV's VCR's, Computers and Chargers while they are 'off.' Called 'vampires' and 'wall-warts' by Energy Experts, there has been growing support of their recommendations to adopt industry-wide standards, which would require manufacturers to build appliances with significantly lower consumption when not in use."
That's a lot of power!! And we are talking about idle appliances, not active ones?! Now, what do they mean by a "typical house"? How many appliances are sucking the power? Let's see...
TV, VCR, DVD
Computer, Modem (Cable/DSL)
Battery chargers
Alarm clocks
Refrigerators
Furnaces
hmm... anyone know what the power breakdown for these items is?
I always thought ATX power supplies are quite wasteful.
Let's go back to AT, shall we?
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
Have the industries make green power that can be used to mitigate the energy costs, and is easy and affordable for home use. That would give them a bit more incentive to innovate in the solar and wind power markets, and may eventually have an impact on the demand for coal and oil.
Seriously, how low can they make the power consumption without raising the price of the item significantly? It seems to me that with Energy Star, eco friendly should already be in the stuff we buy.
Like Sweepstakes? Try out my service @ http://www.yourpowersweeps.com -- Free 21 day trial, no cc needed.
People should unplug their appliances? Switch the main circuit breakers for a total stop of consumption...
;)
Heck maybe they should buy Macs with better performance per watt.
As we are all gentlemen here, I will take it on your word that your yes is a yes and your OFF is....almost off?
But seriously, let off be off.
At least with a computer, you can flip the power supply and have it *off* off...right?
I've got tons of these around the house, probably more then the average. Chargers are one big problem, electronics are another. The two that annoy me most are the stereo(does a stupid light show unless you push the stop button, then just has a smaller light show) and the cable box(is supposedly off, but still gets "messages" from the cable company).
I've read that many VCR's, DVD's, etc. use as much electricity when "off" as they do when in use, with the difference being as little as the amount of electricity used by the electric motors actually used to spin the DVD or move the tape.
That is just lazy design and very wasteful.
Some things like a Tivo of course need to remain "on" to record upcoming shows, but even then should be in a deep sleep until needed. However, that is not the case. They sit there, actively sucking down juice 24/7/365.
Lose Weight and Feel Great with Isagenix
I have been noticing that more of the latest gadgets like HDTVs, subwoofers, amplifiers, DVD players, etc., now just go into standby mode instead of turning off. I could actually hear the transformer of my subwoofer humming even when it is supposed to be off... The only way to turn it completely off is to unplug the power cord.
Do I smell the need for a review of an in-between appliance and wall power meter? What are some good ones that you've seen/used?
I've always had the following question, and this thread seems the perfect place to get a response: Does anyone know how large the difference in power consumption is for a typical, relatively modern, let's say 100 watt stereo when it is turned off (or according to the article, idling), vs when it is turned on under vid/aux mode, but with the volume completely down? (this is assuming no discs are spinning etc).
Robert Bindler
A Computer Science student's views on technology.
How about a switch in each room that turns off all the crap inside of it?
I've audited my home for vampires, and I've since been desoldering leds, and using X10 modules to turn off VCR clocks (I have both a watch and a cellphone - but thanks for the valueadd of a clock on my microwave, coffee maker, vcr, phone, scale, etc.)
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
In the United States alone, over $1 billion per year is spent...
The US has about 300 million people. So that's less than $4 per person per year, or 16 bucks for a family of 4. Doesn't seem worth worrying about to me. A family of 4 spends more than that on a single tank of gas for their car.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
What about using surge protectors to make sure your stuff is "off"? That's what I use for my whole network - okay, so it's only two computers. But still, everything runs to a master switch. When stuff is done for the day I hit the kill switch... I would say this cuts the power to the devices since my LAN link lights all go dead.
I'd like someone to invent small wind generation units, that people can mount on their roof, and it would provide power to "vampire devices" so that your TV, VCR, and other remote controlled devices can have power, but not use anything from the power grid until they are turned on.
Solar power would work too, but I suspect wind would be more powerful with a small generator, but anyone is free to correct me if they know better.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
I've long since wanted to get a Kill A Watt Meter to check the power consumption of the equipment I have. At $35 it's a bargain.
With electricity prices skyrocketing I'm noticing which lights are on the most and replacing them with full spectrum compact flourescents that have a really nice, white light but use about 1/5 the juice.
Lose Weight and Feel Great with Isagenix
One 100 watt light bulbs worth? Making everyone use more efficient lights would save a lot more than that. Filament based lights have got to go! My gadget's LEDs are more than enough to light my room!!
All of the power strips I see in Japan have switches next to each socket to turn off the socket for each individual appliance. Looks like a good solution to me.
What's the point of making more energy when a good chunk of it will go to waste? Green energy is good, but it's not to be wasted.
My pet peeve is the almost unlimited combination of wall wart connectors, polarity, output voltage, output current, etc. Wouldn't it be so much easier if there was some sort of standard wall wart power supply with a standard connector? If you're a gadget geek, you wind up with a rather unwieldy pile of these things in your home and many of them invariably wind up staying plugged in all the time. You can tell they're using energy since they're always a bit warm to the touch, even when the actual device that's supposed to use it isn't even plugged in. Once they standardize the form factor, perhaps they could actually enhance them to the point where quiescent energy usage is much lower.
Buy one of these Kill-a-watt meters and find out. The things I've checked burn only a watt or two while "off".
http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?from=R40I unplug all my clocks when I'm not using them.
"Energy efficiency experts say the answer lies instead in industry-wide standards, which would require manufacturers to build appliances with low consumption when in standby."
Wouldn't it be nice if the 'Energy experts' spent more time promoting the most obvious source of free power in (and out of) the world; solar power?
Installing just a few solar roof shingles would easily off-set the cost of vampire appliances.
see: http://www.oksolar.com/roof/
Not only do they generate power for your whole household, they end up paying for themselves when you produce a greater current than you are taking in. The energy is sent back to the power line and the energy company pays you.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
But I've always hated the term "wall warts"
"How do I turn it off"
"Press the 'power' button"
"I did that, but there's still a light on."
"That's the 'standby' light."
"The what?"
"That's the light that comes on to tell you that the appliance is off."
"!!???"
"I don't know why."
"You mean one light or another is going to be on the entire time we own this appliance, unless we unplug it?"
"Yep. Get used to it. Everything's that way now."
It used to be that the power button was just a switch that did the same thing as unplugging it, to save you the inconvenience. They've now thoughtfully removed that feature; if you really want it OFF, you have to go back to unplugging it again.
All of this coincided with a preponderance of clocks. I can see two engineers somewhere having a conversation:
"Have you noticed how cheap digital clocks have gotten?"
"Yeah! Let's put them in everything!"
I remember when my neighbor's old analogue kitchen wall clock died, so he said he'd better shop for a new one. I asked him if he really needed another, because there were already digital clocks on his coffee machine, oven, range top, microwave, radio, and even toaster oven. Pretty much everything that used electricity in the kitchen except the refrigerator and mixer had their own LED clock.
They still replaced the wall clock. It's the only one they looked at. It came as news to them that they already had six clocks in their kitchen. They'd never noticed them.
Feature-creep didn't originate with software.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
I'd rather not, replacing the supply often ment changing the physical plug on the front of the case. ATX and newer designs offer power to the board as long it it's plugged in, for features such as Wake-on-LAN (and modem). For home users, this is a waste, but useful in business networks. Since ATX uses "soft-power" it needs to power the board to a small degree.
What about my God-given right as an American to be wasteful?
My own house runs about 45 watts. The furnace alone has a microprocessor in it that takes a good 16 watts. Each GFI (ground fault interrupter circuit breaker that prevents you from getting shocked in wet places like kitchen, bathroom, outdoors) takes up a watt, but you can eliminate that draw by leaving them "popped." I have three motion detector lights -- they save energy, but they take about 2-3 watts each when the lights are off. The garage door opener has a radio receiver that draws about 4. We have a remote control TV that takes 6 watts. Phone answering machines are good for about 4-5 watts. Oh, and a PCI motherboard (it is always "on" when the computer is plugged in) is good for about 4 watts -- I have mine on a "power center", but I can't get my wife to put her computer on a "power center."
I know this info by using either a power meter that the local utility loans out through the public library or by counting turns on the outside electric meter (If you meter says 7.2 on it, it means it is 7.2 watt-hours for every turn. If it takes 10 minutes to make one full turn with everything turned of, it makes 3600/(10X60) turns or 6 turns per hour, or the house is using 6X7.2 or 43.2 watts -- instead of standing outside counting a full turn of the meter, you can turn on a light inside of known wattage to bias the reading higher so the meter turns faster. Also, you have to time a complete turn because there is runnout in the power meter rotor -- it goes faster and slower over different parts of a turn, but it is calibrated to read to better than 1 percent for a complete turn.).
Translated in human language: In the typical house that's 100 W.
By definition, watts are independant of time. Joules are a quantity of energy, and 1 watt = 1 Joule per second.
It's sad to see that the tech section of one of the US's largest newspaper feels the need to dumb down its writing, or maybe just hires incompetent writers. Drool-proof paper cannot be far.
On the plus side, no units in the article were compared to a football field or a the Library of Congress, for once. That's progress, I suppose.
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
I don't have a family or a car, you insensitive clod!
I'll be your candy shop of infinite deliciousity if you'll be my discotheque of endless rump-shaking.
Your absolutely right. There are other very simple things, very cheap things - for example, insulative lining around your windows and doors, double paned windows, etc - that will save you so much more. $4 a person is a piss in the lake in comparison. My take? its a marketing scheme to get us to replace our existing appliances.
-everphilski-
I thought it to be a bargain to draw only 4 watts if I can could have instant boot-up, phone answering machine, and Fax, all on my PC. The idea was to enable hibernate and use wake-on-ring of the modem to bring the PC out of hibernate to answer the phone.
I have never, ever gotten hibernate to work properly on a Windows PC, and I have tried different PC's and motherboards. I think I could get wake-on-ring to answer the phone from sleep, which runs about 20 watts, but not from hibernate. In any event, recovery from hibernate does weird things like mess up the mouse driver, or put the video in some strange way, or just freeze the computer on restart.
Anyone out there have better luck with hibernate?
WRT ATX power: push the button (keeping it pushed) for five/ten seconds and it forces the power off.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
If you live in southern California this is a good idea, paybacks in as little as 4 years. (Including government subsidies) If you live in MN like I do, you are looking at a 30 year payback if all goes well - which is longer than many roofs last. If you shovel the roof you might do better, but that is both dangerous (Don't fall off the roof), and harmful to the panels (which tend to be easily damaged when walked on).
If you live in areas with a lot of sun you are stupid not to investigate this. Many people live in climates where they do not pay off.
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,87100,0 0.asp
George Bush campaigned for this stuff back in the early days. I may not like the guy much, but he was right about this. Companies consistently make their products more power inefficient just to make them cheaper, because very very few people pay attention to efficiency of appliances. They save a few pennies on day 1 and give it back and then some every year.
Energy Star has been incredibly effective. The cheapest refrigerator you buy is within 80% as efficient as the most efficient models. This is definitely not true with many other classes of devices (like lights!).
Bush also inadvertently coined a great spoonerism about power-stealing vampires when talking about this initiative.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
I highly recommend them.
Lets me find things like my new Athlon X2 4200+ system takes less power than my old P4 3.0GHz (esp. at idle). And my Athlon XP 1700+ before that takes less than either of them, even at idle when they others are at full bore.
Sadly, it also tells me my P4 3.0GHz took 5W when "off", and 5W when in suspend to RAM (S3 standby), but my new Athlon 64 X2 takes 7W when "off" and 12W when in suspend to RAM (S3 standby). That'll cost me $7/year just to have this computer.
I know the power consumption and cost per year (for 24/7 devices like a fridge) or cost per hour (for things you turn on and off like TVs) for everything I have that I could unplug and put my Kill-A-Watt on. That means I don't know about my stove, dryer (both 220V) and dishwasher (power plug is inaccessible).
For example, it costs me about $45/year to run a TiVo, just for the power. I use fluorescent lights wherever possible.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Suppose a transformer wall wart uses 4 watts and you can replace it with a solid-state ferrite switcher that uses .5 watts. It would take nearly 100 dollars of solar panel to do the same thing.
Oh, and about back feeding the line, you could probably get away with a small amount of back feed and just don't tell anyone about it. If you put up a serious solar panel setup and plan to back feed enough that the power company will notice, they get real, real huffy about that. In fact, they are supposed to by law buy back your power, but they really hate that. I was at an alternate energy fair where the local utility was touting their wind mills (you pay extra for the bragging rights of getting "green power"), and when I asked the utility dude about home solar panels and back feeds, he was telling me about all kinds of restrictions (two meter arrangements where you pay more for incoming and get back less on outgoing), and when I mentioned the laws regulating buyback, the fellow got in my face an I thought I would get punched. So much for committment to green power.
but with Global Warming and all, Minnesota may just be the next Arizona!
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Hibernate works fine on my laptop -- if I don't use all 1.25 GiB of RAM at any time before hibernating. (I have plenty of disk space -- it's a windows bug.)
Maybe it's a laptop/desktop thing?
There's also a problem with light pollution in cities. Too many businesses leave bright lights on all night, which lights up the sky and makes it impossible to see the stars. Amateur astronomers have to drive farther and farther to get to dark skies. I'd imagine this is a much bigger waste of energy than people's VCRs always keeping an LED on. A few towns have passed light pollution ordinances.
Find free books.
This is a bit off-topic, but this discussion is timely. This afternoon, we received a draft of a memo for comment. The gist of the memo is that, due to State budget cuts, as a result of the Hurricanes (I am in Louisiana), the suits have had the bright idea of having all sys admins shut down their machines when they are not in use. The suggestion was that machines should go to standby mode after 15 mins and power off after two hours of inactivity. Ages ago, I remember a debate on the topic of whether or not it was better to leave a computer running, or switch it off, at least at night. My recollection is that the conclusion was that it was better to leave machines running, due to wear and tear on the hardware from booting up. I did some Googling on the topic, but did not find anything too concrete (like real research). If anyone reading this knows of some empirical studies, I would be very grateful. It would be a real shame if, to save a few $ on Watts, we ended up costing ourselves a bomb in trashed hardware (which we currently cannot afford to replace). Please post replies here. Many thanks!
Laser printers take a lot of power when standing by, like copy machines. They keep the innards partially warmed up for fast response.
But my Canon inkjet (Pixma 8500) is fantastic. On the Kill-A-Watt you can see that within a minute of printing, it drops to less than 1W consumption. Measuring it over time (Kill-A-Watt doesn't measure less than 1W instantaneous) says it takes about 150mW in this standby mode. That's great. I suppose off takes less, I guess. I have mine set to turn off after 20 minutes. Honestly though, I bet it just turns off the LED (30mW?) and remains in the same state otherwise, because it wakes from off very fast (and without touching it, it does so over USB).
Of course, the inks cost a lot compared to toner... (Cheaper than most though)
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
From the article summary (opting out of the free registration, I didn't read the article), the average household wastes 100 watts continuously on devices that are off. That's 2.4 kwh per day, or 876 kilowatt hours per year. Assuming electricity costs 10 cents per kilowatt hour, that would be $87.60 per year. Assuming there are 100 million households in the US, that would amount to 8.76 billion dollars. Does "over $1 billion" in this context actually mean "about $9 billion"?
What I would like to see is mandatory labelling. I want Staples and Best Buy to adopt some sort of standard energy impact sticker, like the nutrition labels the FDA requires for food. Ever bought a window air conditioning unit from Sears? All models are displayed with a big yellow sticker from the EPA listing their effeciancy. I bought the one with the highest effeciancy and was comfortable all summer long. What if home electronics were all displayed with something in the same vein? Let's make this into a pissing contest! Let people brag about how little power their gear uses!
Wallwart DC transformers waste more power than appliances on standby. Wallwarts are manufactured as cheaply as possible. The cheap solution is a magnetic core saturation circuit which leaves the transformer drawing max current regardless of output. There's a dozen or so wallwarts in my place drawing about 20 watts each.
I got a P3 for my Dad, and have since borrowed it to meter nearly everything in my house just for fun. [Yeah I said fun, this is Slashdot and if I consider plugging things in to test for Wattage use as fun, that's fine.] I got the meter from eBay, it was about $30.
/Speakers/Monitor/Modems/Sony VCR, 13" TV, UPS, all typically used, but the computer running 24/7:
Here are some of my results:
Air Conditioner wall unit: 2 hours: 17 minutes 3.12 kWh and 1300W when running.
Fridge from the 1970s, about 126W when running.
Microwave from 1980, 888W when running
Clock Radio from 1986, with the radio on and volume low, 0W measured.
Computer 1800+ AMD, 3 IDE HD, and Radeon AIW 8500DV
185W approximately
214 hours 38.62kWh
1083 hours 188kWh
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
What product is the result of the tiny increase in cost is it that you write of? Fan technology is pretty barbaric. Aside from running a cooler unit, which is going to have a fan anyway, what could they do to decrease the power consumption of a fan? Presumably you're not talking about a different product entirely, but just an increase in efficiency. Movement of air is pure work, so I don't see how you're going to up the efficiency much.
Oddly, that same one horse power can be used to drag some considerable weight across the field, but certainly not an entire library of congress' worth.
So, the logical conclusion is that free-range horses are not very efficient. They could probably move with only something like one dog powers worth of power.
On the other hand, my car gets 30 miles per gallon, but it sounds so much better when I say it gets 30 furlongs to the pint. Which somehow reminds me of horses again.
I think I'll call my bookie.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Anyone out there have better luck with hibernate?
Laptops I have had it work perfectly fine. OEM machines can be pretty hit and miss, the SFF ones seem to fair better (I'm guessing it's because most of them have everything integrated into the motherboard. As for homebuilt PCs, I have never gotten it to work right - some of them won't even go into standby mode. Or if they do, they leave the harddrives spinning (wtf?). I just end up turning them off when they aren't needed.
I remember the large red one that was included with every PC back in the old days. It really turned off the PC instantly and I didn't have to unplug the PC because whinedos refused to let me power it off.
Just get a wall switch for everything and you can flip it off.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
current x potential (voltage) / power factor = power (Watts)
You cannot measure power factor with a multimeter. A Kill-A-Watt measures both VA (what you measured) and power (Watts) and since it knows both, power factor too.
Additionally, with your system if a device has a large surge current it might blow your meter. Or you might hurt yourself. Better to use an inductive current clamp (around only one wire, you cannot pass the entire power cord of line, load and ground through it), since it cannot overload in any way that causes danger or costs money to repair.
But really, get a Kill-A-Watt. It can measure over time the power consumption of a device. For example, it'll tell me how much power my computer takes in a week of use. It does this by measuring and integrating the power usage over time. For example, I've had my PC plugged into the Kill-A-Watt for 650 hours and it has used 15.25 KWh in that time. A month has about 740 hours in it, so I use about 17.4KWh/month for my PC. It is on for some of that time, off for some and in standby for most of it.
There's no other way to measure how much power your fridge uses in a week, unless you want to measure standby power (including power factor), compressor on power (including power factor), and then manually record each time your fridge turns on and for how long.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
You let them off the hook, but give them an incentive to develop green alternatives that will hopefully, put more money into research for non-polluting electricity. We can only conserve so much, but we can innovate infinately.
And cost 15-30 times regular compact flourescents, which are available for $1 apiece at your local "home improvement" store, and even less with rebates/incentives from electric companies and Energy Star?
$15 for a 15W CF bulb? You gotta be fucking kidding me.
Please help metamoderate.
I typically plug most of my stuff into powerstrips and with the exception of the cable box which takes forever to restart, I turn the powerstrips off every night before I go to bed. Most of these components I've had for at least 5 years and none of them have any problems working as soon as I turn the powerstrip back on. Even my reciever remembers all of its settings and I've left the powerstrip turned off on it for weeks while on vacation.
Of course this raises the question, "if they work fine after having no power sent to them, then why are they made to draw power even when they are off???" Can anyone answer that?
I got in the habit when I lived in the dorms in college and could hear the stuff humming while I was trying to sleep and just kept doing it ever since. I suppose it is like these electronic thermostats that seem so popular. My family always just turned it down before the last person went to sleep at night...
Realistically, there are tons of other places that waste much more electricity than appliances. Basically all the buildings at all the universities I've either studies or worked at leave lots of lights on 24/7. During holiday breaks, I've even tried to turn off the lights in the hallway of our dept. office only to come back the next day to find that someone has turned them back on and left them on. Of course that isn't even mentioning the fact that the heat in our building can't be adjusted and so during the winter it is so hot we open the windows in the hall and turn the AC on in our offices (and I do just turn the "Fan" part of the AC unit on since it is winter and cold out, but many of others do actually put the AC on high)...
or the fact that we are told not to turn off our office computers, or the people who live four blocks away but still seem to need to drive to the office...
While I haven't done any calculations on it, I would imagine that fixing the heating in our department building would save more energy than all of the department members unplugging their electonics while not in use...
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
Power factor varies from 0 (pure reactance) to 1 (pure resistance) and is equal to the cosine of the difference between the current phase and voltage phase. Other than that minor goof, a very nice write-up.
The most compelling reason for using the "Kill-A-Watt" over a multimeter is safety. We had someone at work who wanted to brew up a power line wattmeter, and I persuaded him that it would be cheaper and much safer to buy a ready made wattmeter. The project did get mentioned on Slashdot a few months back - adapting a Mac Mini to run on batteries.
I use hiberate on my home-built Windows 2000 Pro PC, largely without problems. It helps to have the latest drivers for everything.
De-hibernating isn't appreciably quicker than booting, but it's useful having all the apps come up as I left them. The one slight issue I have is that the de-hibernate time varies between slightly longer than the time taken to read from disk, to much much longer (with many steps in between). I've not yet worked out why this is, and sometimes I have aborted de-hibernation because I got bored waiting. But it doesn't happen often now, and hey, you do save all your work before you hibernate right?
Standby mode (save to RAM), however, is very hit and miss. But given it's vulnerable to power failures anyway, I'd sooner trust hibernation.
I think I read somewhere that 60% of homes are heated by methane (CH4) (Natural Gas). Last I checked today the price of Nat Gas is $11.41 and I expect this is at the Henry Hub and the units are MM-btu's (ie 1 million btu). The conversion factor between MM-btu and GJ is 1.054615. For some reason the "units" program shows this conversion factor as 1.0550559. This is close enough for the girls I go with.
Since there are 3600 seconds in an hour an energy consumption of 1 kWh is equivalent to an energy consumption of 3600 kilojoules. Eg - for the units impaired we do this:
kWh => k(W)(h) => k(j/s)(h) => k(j/s)(3600s) => k(j)(3600)(s/s) => 3600 kj = 3.6*10^6j = 3.6e6j (the later being scientific notation)
We know the price of NatGas is 11.41 for 1 MM-btu (10^6 btu = 1e6 btu)
multiply by 1.054615 and we get about $12 bux = 1Gj = 10^9j = 1e9j
divide by 1000 to get: $0.012 = 10^6j = 1e6j
but: kWh = 3.6e6j = 3.6(1e6j) = 3.6 * 0.012 = 4.3 cents.
This is a wholesale price for natgas. Wholesale prices for electricty are about 5 cents per kWh. Delivered prices are about 2x in both cases as well. Check your energy bills.
What this shows is that at present prices, the cost of energy from a source such as delivered natural gas is about the same as the cost of energy from electricty. When you consider that electricty can be used to drive a heat pump (whole house negative fridge) at an overall thermal effciency of upwards of 300% if earth or lake coupled then it is actually cheaper and more energy efficient to heat our homes with electricty rather than natural gas. Ditto with oil.
Now a standard incandecent heater (light bulb) is upwards of 90% efficient. IE - when you run your incandecent heater you leak about 10% or so of the energy in the visible spectrum while the vast majority of the energy is retained as usable heat. Much of the visible light falls on walls and floors and furniture and people and pets and most of this energy is also salvaged eventually as heat. Only that small portion which leaks out of windows is actually lost.
Hense we can say that the heating effciency of an incandecent lightbulb is pretty close overall to 100% so it really is pretty close to being on par with natural gas and other energy sources such as oil.
What this means is that the energy loss from appliances offsets the energy consumption from the furnace and the prices are so close it is more or less a wash. If we check the futures prices on Natural Gas come March we may find the old 100 watt light bulbs are cheaper.
-------------
What these calculations demonstrate is that in the winter heating season the only path to energy conservation is through attention to the building envelope. Energy efficient appliances accomplish next to nothing (in colloqial French Canadian this is loosely translated to SFA).
However in the cooling season in summer the story is a lot different. These applicances during summer add to the cooling load of the building and this load is very considerable. Still in summer if we pay attention again to the building envelope then we can eliminate a huge percentage of the energy that must be pushed out of the building against the thermal gradient by the HVAC system. Note that in this case the Delta-T for an air coupled system might be sitting at say 40F while the Delta-T for an earth or water coupled system might only be 10F.
So energy efficient appliances and lighting starts to make a great deal of sense once we get the building envelope insulation up where it should be which in Northern States and Canada is probably north of R50 in the walls and R70 in the ceilings. Then we can use the electricty saved to run a small earth or water coupled HVAC/Heat pump system and in so doing more or less eliminate the dependancy on Natural Gas and heating oil.
However with the typical homes we live in - especially in the winter time - its a wash. Pay for your energy as electricity or pay for it as Nat Gas.
It costs money, time and _energy_ to make new devices or modify old ones to use less power.
;).
100w for 24 hours is = 2.4kWh. Oh wow. Pardon me if I find this whole thing rather silly or even stupid.
1 litre of petrol is approx 9kWh. So if you drive about 3 to 4km (2 to 3 miles) on a typical car you'd use that much energy already. Imagine if you just decided to be a bit heavy on the accelerator one day whilst slightly late for an appointment, or have to go up a hill.
If you can save that 2.4kWh/day from your wallwarts/vampires easily, sure do it. But if it takes a lot of effort, I think there are plenty of easier ways to save 2.4kWh/day.
If you're in somewhere warm, use two airconditioners for an hour less each (or four for 30 minutes less), or put them on a higher temperature setting.
If you're in some place cold, turn your heaters down and/or use your computers as heaters - run the protein folding thing - so at least you're doing something useful while generating heat
I think people should get their priorities in order. Rather than get worked up over low priority/impact stuff. Makes me wonder if politicians or someone is trying to distract people from more important stuff.
I mean how many kilowatt hours does it already cost to get a single 70 ton battle tank to Iraq and how much to keep it running there? And even that is not as important as wtf are the US doing there in the first place, and how they ended up there. Sheesh.
What a dumb ass stupid moderation!
I've been thinking setting up windmills or solar cell panels or whatever comes to my mind (to play with). But decided that I would settle for the power strip that shuts itself down when the devices connected to it consume power below certain level(preferably adjustable). Now I've seen some companies make/sell them, but are there any DIY circuit schematics? (sadly I'm not an electronics expert) If that tiny power consumption bothers this could be a handy solution I think.
Mod Parent Up Higher!
Does anyone know whether the PS2 is a vampire when the back power switch is flipped to "off"? or how much it drains when just the front power button is off? it deons't meatre if you msipesl a wrod as lnog as the frsit and lsat ltretrs are the smae.
"Oops! I should have warned you. That clock gets incredibly hot if you leave it plugged in."
I am not a crackpot.
Or rig toy motors (the kind that generate electricity when you turn the shaft, such as this) to your doors so that each time you open or close a door, you generate enough electricity to run a VCR clock for a few minutes.
you think I'm kidding. That is one of the better comments I've seen today. Mod it up! In other news, we need to be more original than "Mod Parent Up" all the time. Hence "higher than a kite". If anyone comes up with a relevant "high" stoner joke, use it in your next "mod parent up" comment, because I'd love to see a comment like that get modded up itself.
And yes, all these sorts of random ramblings get posted as an AC.
That's why with the most recent iPod releases Apple choose to remove the wall plug charger from the package, not only does it deliver additional value to its shareholders, but now that users are charging their iPods from USB ports, they can do away with one more power inefficient transformer plugged into the wall all the time!
Good on you Steve, only a brilliant CEO like you can think up something like this!
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
I can't say enough bad things about "modern" microwaves. So many buttons, so little time. My all time favorite microwave design is the kind with two knobs: one points to the power level; turn the other to point to the desired time, it counts down to zero, then dings once. This design offers several advantages: inherent [real] power switch, obvious and easy to remember operation, and no chance for obnoxious "intelligence" to beep at me continuously until I open the door (my current microwave does this; I'd like to shoot it).
The only disadvantage I can see is that it doesn't allow times greater than the knob's maximum. But the advantages are so overwhelming, I don't think this is an issue.
Living in a country where you need to heat your building 75% of the year I don't really think it make that much difference if the heat is generated by radiators or gadgets. Remember that all the energy will become heat eventually. Never seen this taken into the approximations on extra energy spent though....
Small scale wind turbines already exist. Wikipedia shows a picture of a roof-mounted turbine much like you describe: this rooftop-mounted urban wind turbine charges a 12 volt battery and runs various 12 volt appliances within the building on which it is installed.
Of course, the real question is why you would waste time and money running a separate power grid in your house, just to supply electricity to things you're obviously willing to do without (say, if it's not windy outside). I'm all for sustainable energy, but might as well put it to a good use if you're going to go to the effort of collecting it.
I meant "continually". Another advantage is that it's just as easy to set it to 1:00 as it is to 2:43. It's an interesting thought that with a button pad, it's easier to set it to 1:11 than 1:00.
The compressor is stalling.
It's about shot.
Well, that's my guess.
A defrost cycle just runs the compressor in reverse, it doesn't run some kind of separate heating element. So it shouldn't take more power than cooling. But I dunno. Maybe someone else does.
I told my friend how much his "garage fridge" (older fridge) was costing him to run, he about crapped his pants.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
but how abought (gasp!)when I hit the power button, an appliance (computer, TV, VCR, stereo, whathefuggever!) just turns off, much like 'old' ATX computer's used to do - when you hit the power button, it controlled a relay that turned off the actual p/s. It required physical contact (hitting the button again) to start the computer again... This meant I could turn off my comp if it froze without holding down the power button for 4 secs... of course, if I want it to sleep/hibernate, that's different...
when I hit the power button, I want something to turn off. period. no sleeping, no drawing an extra watt or two, off should mean off!
------
ok, mod me down, I'm sure I've repeated some one, some where
I suppose there's always the main electrical panel switch in the garage. That would guarantee zero draw. :-) Of course, I have no idea what the effects on the water and gas systems would be...
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
if I could program my cpu to turn off and on at certain times (not just go into sleep mode, where it sucks a pile of power, but off to the point that the only thing running is a clock).
Since I wake up and go to sleep at the same time every week day, a pretty simple algorithm would suffice: IF (weekday)&(not used in 30 minutes)&(after midnight) THEN (turn off). If (weekday) and (after 6am) THEN (turn on). Same routine for turning off during the day when I am at work.
I often leave my cpu on at night because I hate waiting for it to boot up in the morning.
I think if you're going to consider moving your hand 2 inches to press the "0" a difficulty, then you should likewise consider that When setting the knob you'll have to turn much further to get to 2:43 as opposed to 1:00. If we're gonna split hairs, let's do it fairly.
How many fulltime jobs can one man have?
I did not say it was difficult. Merely more difficult. It's a very minor point, but one I find interesting.
Ok, I'll agree it's more difficult to turn a knob to 2:34 than to 1:00*. Though I submit that this difference is quite a bit smaller than in the keypad's case (which is already very small, yes). Unless maybe it's a computer keyboard and you've mastered touch typing...
And on a keypad, what happens if you make a mistake? I've yet to see a microwave with a backspace key, but neither backspace nor starting over are very appealing. With a knob it's all but impossible to "hit the wrong button". (well, you could be thinking one thing and turning the knob to another thing, but in that case both microwaves are about equal).
* Or maybe it isn't. There are probably certain angles that are very easy for the wrist to turn to such as the approx 135 deg turn from palm down to palm mostly up. So wherever the easy turns line up are easy... which may not be a simple linear function.
Ok, I think I've gone too far in my [likely flawed] analysis. But I hope you will agree that microwave manufactures have not gone nearly far enough. And if the manufacturer insists on avoiding a low tech knob, it can use an iPod style clickwheel... Just don't make me push so many buttons to do such a simple thing. Or at least leave off the "beverage" and "snacks" buttons... My microwave has 26 buttons. Seriously.
It is often assumed that all this energy is waisted, but in fact it is not, at least not this 100% as figures want to believe you.
Here in holland i have to heat my house about 7-9 months a year, only in the summer it is hot enough to have the heating disabled.
All my equipment, computers, teli etc etc. do (in the end) convert electricity to heat. Besides that they may also be of other use.
I know of countries where generally all heating is done with electricity. Here we have the luxury of gas heating. So, indeed gas heating may be some more efficient then using electricity, but on the other hand rest heat of power stations is again used to heat green houses etc.
Also, for example, my hot water equipment for kitchen and shower uses electricity because gas-heating is considered to be dangerous because of the carbonmonoxide being generated, and if you calculate further, gas heating has additional loss of energy due to the extra ventilation needed.
So, all my electricity use helps to get my house warm. It is some less efficient than gas heating, but it is not all 'lost' or 'waisted'.
Of course this is not an excuse to spill electricity, and in "hot" countries where an airco is needed it will work the other way around, but in each and every study i see this issue is just forgotten.
A glitch a day keeps the bugs away.
Actually, TV's have been "staying on" for at least 25 years by recollection. Once upon a time, it was a marketing feature called "Instant-On". Before instant-on, it often took 60-90 seconds after hitting (or, usually, pulling) the power button to get a decent picture out of it.
They solved this by leaving certain tube heaters on (possibly at low power) all the time. Hence the reason why you could look inside your TV and see a faint orange glow, usually near the neck of the CRT.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
Purchase X10 controlled outlets and install them where the offending devices are located and then use your uber-geek skills to program simple timers to shut off these devices during times of non-use. I actually do this for my stereo and it works rather well.
For anyone else with a basic knowledge of electricity who was confused,
Power=Voltage*Current in DC.
Converting that to units, Watts=Volts*Amps
So a watt is a volt-amp. So the units are the same.
What's the difference in the rating between P and S?
Apparent power is V*I, where both are measured the usual way - root mean square.
In AC, Actual power output is less because the current lags behind the voltage a bit. So at any given point, the power output is actually
P=S*cos(phase), where the phase is the difference between the voltage and the current waves.
VA is important because the part of the power that isn't absorbed by a device is still actually going through your system, so it could damage something.
Here's a nice overview of the three kinds of power.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
1) Fans don't always draw their stated power. Put a meter on it to find out.
2) A lot of the cost goes into the quality. e.g. ball bearings instead of sleeve.
3) Fans would do better with better magnets. e.g. higher cost.
3a) Electronic controls likewise cost.
4) Piezoelectric fans work for some applications (usually small).
4a) Same with piezomotors.
I've read that air-source heat pumps don't work below about 40 degrees - so they're great for down south where you're using them for cooling half the time, but useless in a northern winter, where they only work by kicking in their supplemental conventional heating coil.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
"If you live in areas with a lot of sun you are stupid not to investigate this. Many people live in climates where they do not pay off."
1) That's why there's no universal energy conservation policy.
2) Solar means more than just silicon cells. There's also solar mirrors (ground level) and storage (thermos) and conversion of heat to electricity as needed (stirling).*
*Solar ponds fit into this catagory.
"One of the interesting initiatives we've taken in Washington, D.C., is we've got these vampire-busting devices. A vampire is a -- a cell deal you can plug in the wall to charge your cell phone."
http://pbahq.smartcampaigns.com/node/208
I tried to find a link that didn't have other Bush quotes in it, I couldn't. So don't be offended if you're a fan.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
and tell Tony to think about the future :)
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
I always used to type in 66 rather than 111 or 100 on my previous microwave. My new microwave however has stupid buttons - A 1 minute one, a 10 second one, and a 1 second one. So 1 minute is just 1 press. However, 8 minutes is 8 presses, etc.
> On the plus side, no units in the article were compared
> to a football field or a the Library of Congress, for once.
> That's progress, I suppose.
Yeah, now for green alternative energy we need a metric like "hamster wheels."
Heh... you got something for your dad and then used it for yourself. Get your dad something for him not for yourself next time eh? :)
Hey, sons get to borrow cool electronic gadgets, and I think he used it some first. And I'll be giving it back before Christmas :-)
After all, aren't sons the definition of "vampire devices"?
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
My microwave has a pretty clever design - it's digital, but has a knob to select the time. It automatically assumes full power if I twist the knob straightaway if I don't choose the power level - twist the knob adds 10 seconds on the time, but if you twist it faster, it adds more time on, such as minutes. I've used it enough so I know exactly how much to twist and it'd add on the exact time I want. So to microwave full power for 2 mins, just twist it just the right amount and right speed and press start. Simple.
Atleast the keypads on newer microwaves are easy to clean and thus are a lot more sanitary. But otherwise, I don't care much for modern microwaves either.
3) Fans would do better with better magnets. e.g. higher cost.
I was magnet shopping last month, and ran across this article:
Neodymium Magnets Boost Fuel Efficiency: Higher efficiency motors, using neodymium-iron-boron magnets, reduce loading on alternators and batteries.
The company rebuilt electric motors on a car to use super-powerful rare-earth magnets (instead of cheap ceramic magnets), and found that the amps drawn decreased significantly. It's more than just a swap-out though - I think they had to re-wind the motor's wire coils...
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
I unplug your clock, when you are using them. Your friendly gremlin.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
What's the point of making more energy when a good chunk of it will go to waste? Green energy is good, but it's not to be wasted.
I agree, but sometimes the articles focus on the needle and not the haystack.
First point... Commuting and green cars. Getting great gas milage is fine, but moving from a small town to the big city for a better job changed my commute from a 10 minute walk to a 45 minute drive each way. Zoning is OK to a point, but a mix of houses and businesses and schools is better than having a city center and bedroom communities which only have strip malls, convience stores, schools and parks. How about putting low/non polluting industry in some neighborhoods for low distance commutes?
Long commutes is our biggest gas waste. City planners need to focus on getting homes/jobs/schools/parks less spread out. Traffic/pollution/costs all decrease when consolidated.
Second point.. With heat, light, AC, entertainment, communications stuff on a typical house with a family of 4, energy costs for many is in the neighborhood of 30KWH/day. A 100 watt idle draw for everyting in the house is 2.4 KWH/day. I am saving more moving to a house with 6 inch walls, insulated floors, a foot of insulation in the attic from my old house with uninsulated floors and R-11 walls and R14 roof.
At 0.12/KWH the 2.4KWH/day is a small portion of my electric & heating energy costs.
A note on the TV idle draw. It isn't the remote reciever that is the power hog. It's the pre-warmed picture tube. I used to repair TV's and got to know the hot when off sections. Cold/hot cycling of the tube shortens the tube life and makes long warm-up times. Having the tube 3/4 warm drasticly reduces thermal cycle shocks and makes them almost instant-on. Some early (1970's Jimmy Carter years) instant on sets had an energy saver switch on the back that would turn off this feature. Cost cutting in manufacturing eliminated the seldom used switch. Pick up a plug in cycle timer (I know more idle watts) to power down the TV, cable box/satelite box, broadband modem, and stereo system at night and morning when nobody is home. They often are all located together. Some electronic progrommable timers draw very little power.
Add a wind up timer to your bathroom fan. Forgetting to turn off the fan after clearing the steam from your morning shower can dump a lot of heated/cooled air out of the house. This is one place a $20 timer can pay for itself in a short time. It saves not only the power the fan uses, but also the cost of the heated/cooled air that gets dumped from excessive run-times.
Add a motion wall switch to your hall and stairway light. No need to leave it on all the time anymore.
The truth shall set you free!
... the idea I've had in my head for an energy efficient AC adapter that would actually be OFF when it's not plugged into something: a simple relay in front of the primary transformer coil, two extra wires in the cord and a modified plug to close an AC circuit across them when it's plugged in. When it's unplugged the relay isn't tripped and AC never energizes the primary coil. Doesn't even require an explicit on/off switch! It's so damned simple even I thought of it, and IANAEE. For the sake of space you might even be able to replace the mechanical relay with some sorta power transistor (though that might create more waste heat, dunno).
*WAY* too many devices that aren't even miniaturized use AC adapters now, like printers and scanners. Why the f**K didn't the lazy bastards just put the little transformer inside the chassis where it could be BEHIND the on/off switch? I can forgive AC adapters where miniaturization is the whole point, but when a device is already large enough that keeping the transformer inside it would require a trivial increase in dimensions, there's just no bloody excuse!
As to the safety issue, I haven't look into this, but suppose you feed your line with a solar panel to line inverter specially designed for grid-connect applications -- say an inverter that is excited from the power line and if the power line goes dead the inverter stops feeding power. The solar power hardware people may indeed have such inverters, and I even heard of solar panels with that sort of thing built right in.
The power companies could say, "yes, you can net meter and back feed, and you can only back feed up to a certain amount, and you have to use an approved inverter, and there is a nominal inspection charge for us to come out and give the OK to your equipment." But that is not what they say. They tell you you need an expensive install of a dual meter setup and that you get paid a lot less for the power generated than for the power consumed, which is not compliant with the net metering laws for consumers. When you politely ask about the net metering laws, they do the "CEO yelling at the TV reporter and threatening to shove the camera guy routine."
As to "why should the powercco give you the storage facility for free whenever you wan't it" the answer is because it is public policy and the law that's why. The same reason why the utilities have a monopoly and can get reg approval to jack up your electric bill to pay for their nuclear power plant problems or to pay off new power plants when you are using the same amount as you always used.
Why is the public policy and the law that way? Because elected representatives were convinced it was good public policy to have the regulated-monopoly power companies in effect subsidize the development of renewable and solar power for a whole variety of reasons, that's why.
The irony of this is our local powerco is putting up these wind mills and asking consumers to voluntarily fork over extra bucks to the power utility simply for the bragging rights of getting wind power. If you want to take your extra bucks, and instead of forking it over to the utility but build your own solar panel, and if you politely ask about what you need to comply with their safety regs and what they need to do to comply to laws on the books, and you do this asking at the Wisconsin Alternate Energy Fair where this same utility is crowing about how green they are, you get a burly utility representative in your face in a primate-species threat posture.
Why would I want to put up my own solar panels instead of forking bucks over to the utility to say I am green? It is an "ownership society" thing. I would rather make my own uneconomic green energy decisions rather than make what I see as a charitable donation to a for-profit company. Also, I own the freakin' solar panel, and if electric rates go through the roof, I benefit from already having paid for the solar panel.
If the power company offered me a deal "you could buy into wind power at 15 cents kwHr or you could purchase regular power at 10 cents a kwHr. Only thing is that we will guarantee the wind power for a fixed 15 cents for, say, 10 years while the 10 cent power you are taking your chances on natural gas getting scarce" I would snap that up. Their current wind power deal is merely writing a donation check to a for-profit company for green bragging rights.
But given the state of solar panels and members of genus Pan at the power companies, I am putting my money into more efficient wall warts. Tell me, where can I get a 1 watt phone answering machine?
Um, volt-amps don't have units of watts. Or not if you wanted full credit on the exam problem I gave last week. A generally followed convention is that volt-amps is the voltage times current without taking into account the phase, watts is the in-phase voltage times current, and VARs (volt-amps, reactive) is the out-of-phase voltage time current. Watts plus VARS add up to VAs as vectors.
You definitely must be one of those ifinitely hooked on phonics kids.
It confuses me that the same IT staff can fret over the amount of electricity their servers use while ignoring the wasted electricity of hundreds of desktop computers. Even computers that sleep use much more energy in the long run than those that are shut down.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
Oh, boo hoo. I spelled something wrong on Slashdot. I will eviscerate myself for such stupidity. The education system must be failing, since I made two spelling mistakes in such a short post. And how kind and noble of you to point it out. Thank you for furthering the cause of lingusitics and deriding me for such infantile spelling. We won't even get into grammar, else, I be sent back to grade school.
In other words, fuck off.
I am not sure that moving businesses out from the city center to the 'bedroom communities' makes any sense... that's exactly what has caused the transportation nightmare in Los Angeles. You assume that everyone who works in these 'bedroom businesses' is going to live close to them?
People don't frequently move to be closer to work, and the average person changes jobs often enough that trying to do so would be ridiculous (particulary with housing costs - sell that house which has appreciated 300%, buy another one and pay out your arse in property tax!).
The opposite of what you say is true - business SHOULD be MORE centralized. This is the only way that mass transit can be effective - and exactly why it's so difficult in Los Angeles to implement any mass transit that makes a difference: too many people need to go to too many places of business scattered everywhere. Rather than a hub-and-spoke arrangement (such as many European cities) we have a 'matrix' arrangement in Los Angeles and lots of other US cities.
Your assumption considers the car to be our major and only transport conduit for now and the future, and I think that thought does not have a long-term shelflife. The problem is that people here want to have the benefits of open space, traditionally the perk of the rural resident, but the high-paying city job and the trappings of a major metropolis. These two are fundamentally incompatable as you scale up population.
I agree that it's annoying that they take a while to warm up, but it's something I can live with to save money.
One thing I did to help with that was to mix bulbs in places where there are more than one. The light fixture in the kitchen has 3 bulbs under a glass dome. I replaced two of them with CFLs and left one incandescent. That way you get some instant light and it helps to fill in the full spectrum to get a more natural light.