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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."
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.
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.
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.
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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.
I used to have a digital cable box which sucked down 30-45w all the time (or something, don't have it anymore, ditched it for normal cable). On/off, didn't make a difference. That thing was always hot.
I've got plenty of wall-worts which suck power, even when nothing is plugged into them, but it's a PITA to unplug them. If the power strips they were plugged into didn't have other electronics plugged in, it'd be easy enough to hit that switch, but who wants a power strip or switch on every single wall-wart they have?
Replacing the power supplies in my PCs with a high efficiency units from Seasonic made a noticable difference. Power draw was reduced 20-30% all the time which is nice.
The charger for my Samsung A670 cell phone is the best, it doesn't use any power when plugged in without the phone. It's so light and small, it doesn't have your typical AC/DC converter in there, not sure how they convert wall power to DC to charge it.
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.
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.