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."

Comments

$4 a person?

[readin]

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.

Re:How about you ask the industry to make more pow

[bryan8m]

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'm doing my part

[Rufus88]

I unplug all my clocks when I'm not using them.

Measuring wall-wart power usage.

[Latent Heat]

Appliances of any kind are typically rated in volt-amps, which tells you the current they draw knowing the voltage, but under worst-case conditions without telling you the power factor to know the P (watts) instead of the |S| (volt-amps). Applicance rating plates are meant to tell you how much current draw and hence how big a circuit breaker or fuse you need -- they are not energy ratings.

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.).