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The True Cost of Standby Power
Luther19 writes, "How much do all of our computers and electronic devices sitting in standby mode cost us? The author of the article concludes that he could save $24.44 per year by switching out wasteful power supplies. The article also touches on a global initiative to cut down on standby power, called '1-Watt': 'The idea has been promoted by the IEA, which first developed an international 1-Watt plan back in 1999. Countries like Australia and Korea have signed on officially, while countries like the US require 1-Watt in government procurement, which will have ripple effects throughout the economy. The goal of the program is to have standby power usage fall below 1W in all products by 2010.'" It's estimated that in industrialized countries, devices on standby consume on average 4% of the power used.
I guess when your speaking for people that buy their computers pre-built; which, might get your geek card revoked on /. for not building your own system. When I shop for a power supply, I might try to find the most efficent cost effective PSU. That way, you cut out the middle man giving you the power supply you really didn't want in the first place.
Ford flipped the switch which he saw was now marked 'Mode Execute Ready' instead of the now old-fashioned 'Access Standby' which had so long ago replaced the appallingly stone-aged 'Off'.
That's a very sensible approach, but to ignore something that could save 4% of 'unused' power with practically no effort would be idiotic.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
Mind you: it's not always a device with an explicit stand-by mode. I once used such a wattmeter on all devices and learned that my 40W lamp with a seemingly #$%#$% cheap transformer was using 25W while "off"!
:S
Factoid: if all American households would not use the stand-by mode of their TV, an entire _nuclear_ power plant can be saved on a national level.
I just finished a comprehensive audit of all the electricity drawing devices in my house:
o ld_energ.html
:-)
http://digitalcrusader.ca/archives/2006/10/househ
I learned that my Stereo system consumes 22W when on "standby" and only about 35W when in use - what a total waste! So I put it on a power bar. My older TV is 0W standby, and all the newer Wall Warts that I have seem to be OK as well - 4 of them together only rate 1W. Your milege may vary
augment your senses: http://sensebridge.net/
Analyzing your budget, you decide you need to cut back. While it appears that cutting the $700 mortgage would be the best way to save money, in actuality you're better off cutting out the $19.99 Netflix subscription to movies you never watch.
If that makes any sense, you'll know what I mean - while cutting the largest consumer of power or money may *seem* like the best place to start, it's often a necessary function which just cannot be cut. However, cutting back on unnecessary waste, even if it's a mere 4%, can be a great investment of effort.
As a republican I feel it my responsibity to manufacture criminals. People need punished!
Buying a new fridge somewhat sooner than you would have otherwise can be a pretty good idea. Especially if the old one had been around for more than 10 years.
http://www.aceee.org/consumerguide/topfridge.htm
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
"Standby power" is what you have when you can use the remote control to turn on the TV, DVD player, etc. It is powered up enough to be able to respond to the remote, i.e. it is standing by for your commands. It need not be a remote, however. A printer with an electronic power button (like a little HP inkjet, for example) is in standby mode, as opposed to the gargantuan EPSON 132-column industrial dot matrix printers that have what looks like a circuit breaker to turn them on and off. A touch-lamp would be using standby power, while a bulb on a mechanical pull-chain switch would not.
This is only very loosely related to your idea of laptop-style standby mode.
You missed the point completely. Congratulations.
ATX PCs are never actually turned off. There is always a trickle of power through the PSU and part of the motherboard, in order to support ATX Soft Power, Wake-On-Lan, Wake-On-Keypress, Wake-From-USB, etc.
Typical CRT monitors are never actually turned off. They keep the tube charged so that you don't have to wait for it to "warm up" when you hit the power switch.
Actually, this problem goes deeper than you thought. Just plugging a wall wart into the wall, when nothing is plugged into it, costs you some power.
To answer your question, however, and not just refute your reasoning: Computers typically have multiple levels of suspend but the most interesting ones are suspend-to-ram and suspend-to-disk. In suspend-to-ram, the CPU does nothing but the memory (and, by extension, the memory refresh controller) are kept active. They maintain the contents of RAM (by refreshing DRAM, as if the computer were on) but aside from the normal standby equipment and any circuitry which must be on if memory is being maintained, the rest of the computer is off. In suspend-to-disk, the contents of any used pages in memory are written to a hibernation file, the state of some of the hardware is stored, and the computer is turned off - meaning only those parts of the system which are always hot (discussed above) are turned on to support WakeOnLan and so on. When you bring the system back up, the contents of the hibernation file are loaded back into memory, the processor state (and driver states) is/are restored, and execution continues more or less where it left off.
Using flash memory or some competitor (like MRAM) you could get the first state without having to keep the memory powered up. Flash memory has a ceiling of about 100,000 writes, but more to the point, it is slow. MRAM doesn't have this problem, but it is currently expensive and does not scale up well.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Amazon
I can tell your from experience (this is one of the more popular demonstrations in the power engineering lab) that cheap watt-meters can be terribly wrong with loads that are not simple resistors.
A transformer with no load (probably in your case - most lamps with halogen lamps have the switch on the secondary side) is almost a perfect inductive load. Current and voltage are not in sync and the (real) power is very close to zero.
Not all instruments can show this correctly. Especially not if they measure voltage and current separately without taking the phase shift in account (as is often the case with cheap stuff). Switching power supplies (almost everything electronic uses one of those today) are also hard to measure. You need a high sampling frequency if you want to accurately measure the power they draw from the mains. Again, consumer instruments don't have this because fast AD converters are expensive.
Just about the _only_ instrument I would trust outside the lab is the watt-meter the power distribution company installed in your house. These things have to go through very thorough testing before they are approved.
Factoid: if all American households would not use the stand-by mode of their TV, an entire _nuclear_ power plant can be saved on a national level. :S
Even better it could save coal usage, which puts out more radiation than nuclear plants do, and still pollutes otherwise.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
Around here you can buy power strips with a special "TV" socket. Plug the TV in the TV socket, and the rest (DVD etc.) in the other sockets. As soon as the power strip detects the TV using less than 20W, it powers off the other sockets. At least that way it's only the TV on stand by.
Is this the one you're talking about? Looks like a good solution, from what I can tell; I'm intrigued. Combine that with using compact fluorescent lights instead of incandescent light bulbs as possible, and you can significantly reduce your home's electricity consumption.
Those LED's cost next to nothing, I would guess on the order of pennies per decade.
The standby cost is the result of inefficient transformers in power supplies that manage to suck power from the grid without doing anything with it.
My question is, if I'm paying for kilo-watt hours and watts are volts * amps, am I paying more when the voltage is higher?
Yes, if you have a big resistor connected to your power mains.
Most equipment uses a certain amount of power. So if the voltage is high, the equipment uses less current (amps). The power is the same. This is especially true for things like switching power supplies, which only switch on (hence the name) a sufficient percentage of the time to get the power they need. Linear power supplies are definitely more wasteful with a higher input voltage, but no equipment I know of uses a linear supply these days. Things like electric heaters, ovens, etc. use resistance elements to turn electricity into heat, and they certainly use more power if the voltage is higher, but then again they're usually thermostatically controlled, so it would simply take less time to make the same amount of heat.
Hell, if the 4% figure is right then we could eliminate ALL nuclear plants simply by eliminating standby mode! The US uses 3.3TW of electricity 4% of 3.3TW is 132,000MW or about 30% more than the total output of all nuclear power facilities in the US (99,988MWe source from this site.) Of course I would be much more in favor of shutting down an equivilant capacity in older coal fired plants since the environmental impact would be about an order of magnitude greater =)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Actually, it did work with cigarettes, at least in Canada. The price of a pack of cigarettes is very high here, around $6 to $8, because of the new taxes introduced, and the number of smokers have started to decline.
Why you don't see a dramatic change with the huge increase in gas prices is due to the fact that gas has highly inelastic demand. Meaning the demand for gas is very insensitve to prices changes. However, over the long term, there is a higher sensitivity to price (higher elasticity), as new techonologies come in (like bio-fuels) to take advantages of higher prices.
The biofuels industry made real progress while prices were high.
That's really more because of ridiculous government subsidies. The US dumps *tons* of money on the 7 farmers we have left. It makes otherwise bad options (biofuels) look good, and hurts lots of farmers in poor countries, who actually import US goods because of the heavy subsidy. But man, do those 7 farmers have it pretty. Didn't you ever wonder why there's high fructose corn syrup in everything?
You mean 154Wh, not 154W.
To put some actual numbers on it, I've measured ATX standby consumption on a few PCs with an AC power meter. They range from a low of 2W for an NForce4 system with a good quality Seasonic PSU to 8W for an NForce2 system with a cheapo no-name PSU that had an LED fan that stayed lit and kept spinning slowly even in standby. The NF4 system could also suspend to RAM which is almost the same as standby but with power still going to RAM. That used about 8-9W. That's bad compared to shutting off, but better than the 50-60W from the computer powered on and idle.
I think the grandparent poster is right on that this should be thought of as a medium-long term goal. Get all of the manufacturers to switch over soon, and let natural attrition shrink the "old power supply" pool while increasing the efficent pool. Eco-hippies can be early adopters if they like, but from a financal standpoint it will take a rather large increase in the cost of power or a significant drop in the cost of efficent power supplies to make this worthwhile.
In the original scientific paper on which this was based, they actually went into detail on anticipated aging and replacement of power supplies. The paper pointed out that, failing incentives, they tended to be swapped out much more slowly than thought, and were recycled far more often than people realize. This applied especially to industrial and large commercial usage. I remember working on mercury and PCB-based transformers, for example, in industrial uses, which had been in operation or kept for temporary standy usage, even though they were many decades old, at the time that more modern transformers were still being brought in based on designs finalized and manufactured eight years beforehand.
Details at Science Direct (institutional subscription required, at most universities/colleges/libraries).
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Leave the door open.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
> Toyota is about to pass GM as the world's biggest, and they sell SMALL CARS. ... All his Camry's were gone.
:-)
c ation/0,4668,3161_1272,00.html
Hmmm... only an American would call the Camry small
1.5 tons empty, 4.8m long, 117kW
But the fuel economy is reasonable at 8.9L/100km. (26.4mpg US?)
http://camry.toyota.com.au/toyota/vehicle/Specifi
Why do I get the impession this is like people that drive all over town to save a penny on the price of gas then spend twice as much as they should on say, bell peppers and underwear cause they just aren't careful.
IMO you should worry about this chit AFTER you've coverted every light bulb in your house to CFL. Until then you're just pissing money away.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Those LED's cost next to nothing, I would guess on the order of pennies per decade.
This is only marginally on topic, but: Why guess? Is it really so hard to multiply a couple numbers? Are you really saving yourself effort buy operating on the basis of ignorant guesses when you could inform yourself within a few seconds by taking a run-of-the mill number for an LED, say 1.6V 20mA makes 32mW, makes 32mWh per hour. Times 24 is 768mWh per day, comes to somewhere under 300Wh per year. Around here we pay ~10c/kWh so you're talking dollars per decade, not pennies per decade. Per LED.
This took me more time to type than it would've taken you to compute. I'm kinda annoyed by this out in the Real World[tm] but on /. I somehow kinda expect people to prefer a simple multiplication over making potentially stupid statements...
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
Conventional tungsten light bulbs are simple, unregulated resistors, and will burn slightly more watts, produce slightly more light, and will last slightly less long on high line voltage.
err - 0.3kWh * $0.1 per kW = $0.03 per year, over 10 years that's 30 cents. So you're wrong, it is pennies per decade. lalalalalalaa. :-)