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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."
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.
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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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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.
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.
I unplug all my clocks when I'm not using them.
Thinkgeek.com just happens to have such a device: http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/electronic/7657/
"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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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
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The problem isn't the clock in the device. The clock logic and LED display use up a tiny fraction of one watt. The problem is the power supply.
Take the microwave for example: people expect to be able to walk up and start punching in a cooking time without first having to push a huge mechanical power switch. (The manufacturer doesn't want to design in a costly extra power switch either.)
This means that the electronics need to be powered on at all times. That wouldn't be a problem, but most appliances use a simple transformer to drive their power supplies. Inexpensive transformers are leaky even when they are supplying no current to the secondary, so the microwave's transformer is probably wasting a couple of watts at all times. The solution to the problem is a better power supply, not omitting the clock or desoldering LEDs.
Some recent wall warts and power bricks that I've got weigh almost nothing and don't seem to get hot. I presume that they've put in switching power circuits and eliminated the 60Hz transformer altogether. Putting that kind of power supply in every appliance would go a long way towards solving this problem.
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...
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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.
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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.