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."
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.
Easy solution: why does every *****ing appliance need to tell me what time it is?
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.
Lose Weight and Feel Great with Isagenix
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.
Seriously, how low can they make the power consumption without raising the price of the item significantly?
How about "very nearly zero"? Ideally, an "off" device would draw zero watts, but I realize we expect our toys to respond at a moments notice, and that takes some electricity.
My TV, when off, draws 7 watts. That presumeably lets it remember its settings and watch for activity from the remote control. Those two tasks, however, should draw in the low milliwatts, certainly not more than a full watt.
Printers also tend to have a very high idle current draw (and by idle I mean cold and in standby not just "not printing". 20-25W seems common for that - More than the total I use for actively lighting my house under normal conditions (assuming three CF lighbulbs at once, fron 5 to 9 watts each).
Of course, I think we'd do a lot better to worry about the active draw of our appliances. For example, the humble 19" box-fan draws a whopping 150W on high. With only a tiny increase in cost, that can drop by a factor of three, yet no one cares because no one realizes what a massive power sucker they have sitting happily humming in the window.
I unplug all my clocks when I'm not using them.
"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?
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/
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.
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.
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.