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Appliances Hog More Energy Than High-Tech Gadgets
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "A tech columnist looked around his home and wondered, 'All these TVs and cable boxes and computers and computer gear and chargers for various adapters have to be sucking up a lot of power, right?' So WSJ.com's Jason Fry bought a power meter to find the biggest power hogs in his home. They weren't his newfangled gadgets: 'The heavily used agglomeration of PC / two monitors / printer / hard drive / speakers in my downstairs study costs a bit more than $10 a month. The PC in our bedroom costs about $6 a month. The upstairs laptop? Less than $1 — a bit more than other always-on gadgets such as the router, cable modem, wireless repeater and Airport Express. So what were our apartment's power hogs? The lights and the dryer. I estimate our lights cost us around $30 a month, nearly a third of that from a chandelier with eight bulbs. Then there's the dryer. I don't know exactly how many watts it uses, but estimate it's costing us at least $25 a month.'"
Yep old style lights are a huge waste. Not only that but the compact fluorescent seem to last much longer.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Well, that $25/month that you pay to run your dryer (even less if you spend a little more upfront and get a gas model) is just about a wash in the long run as compared to the $1.50/load that it would cost at a laundromat. We used to spend $40/month on quarters for laundry. About two-thirds of that was for drying and the rest for washing.
But yeah, those multi-bulb units will really kill you. Once you realize how much it costs per month to operate a 100 watt incandescent light bulb, that's the real incentive for switching to compact fluorescent wherever you can (slow startup-time and all).
Who is General Failure? And why is he reading my disk????
I've converted most of my house - but I keep wondering what's going to happen to all that mercury once they do eventually wear out. I'm not aware of any place in my town that will recycle them.
True enough, though they've gotten a lot closer.
Nonetheless, I remember having a computer room full of always-on PCs, a giant tube television, a huge power sucking amp, and so on -- my furnace never came on. Since switching to a lot of power efficient gear, a low power LCD screen, CF lighting throughout, and so on, suddenly the furnace seems to always be one, so my conservation has been offset to a degree in the winter.
Wasn't there an attempt to force a label on every appliance saying "this device will cost you $x.xx per month if it's kept running" or some such? Can't remember. That would definitely make a lot of sense.
On the other hand, as long as everybody I know never turns off the light in their office I don't expect them to do that at home either. That tells me that energy is still far too cheap.
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He also failed to give real numbers and total things up. Sure, maybe the electric clothes dryer is an energy hog as compared to say the a computer. But it does not let us know if the dryer is twice as bad as a computer, 10x, or 100x. If you have say 3 computers up and running constantly, then it still makes sense to unplug them instead of 'the energy hog' dryer, if the dryer only uses up twice the power of a single computer. I would have loved to know relative strengths, such as 1 electric stove = 7 laptops.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Erm, no. The sticker on your power supply shows the PEAK wattage available, not the actual current draw, which is undoubtedly much less.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
but just a moment of reflection should tell you that yes, anything that generates heat is going to be a huge draw of power. one can directly express heat power in Watts; yes, the same watts used to express electrical power.
electric heaters are usually 1500 watts. light bulbs from 60 to 100 watts. appliance motors in the home are around 1/4 to 1/2 horsepower (1 horsepower ~= 746 watts).
let's keep this in terms of heat for a second. in case you're wondering what uses more power -- your hair dryer or wireless router, you can do this simple test. put your hand on the hair dryer -- in just a few seconds, it will burn. perhaps a 1st degree burn. now, put your hand on your wireless router. warm, but not burn. in fact, it might feel cozy depending on your clime. therefore, i give to you the severity of the burn is proportional to how much electricity a device is using.
another indication is the size of the power cable something uses.
i dunno. i thought every self-respecting nerd had a handle on basic home power and loading.
mr c
"Physics is like sex. Sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it." - R. Feynman
I've spent time thinking about this recently.
Assuming that you're spending money heating your house in the winter, isn't it effectively impossible to "waste" electricity? Any electricity you consume is going to end up as heat (minus an irrelevant amount as light and kinetic energy), which you want anyway.
Of course, if your main heat source is not electricity (e.g. gas), electricity might be slightly more expensive. But I think the basic idea holds.
Bingo. In a typical apartment complex with 16 units per building, all fire risks are multiplied 16x, because a single tenant can burn down all 16 tenants' apartments. So anything that significantly lowers the fire risk gives a bigger payoff.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
So you do not know how many watts your dryer is, yet take the liberty to 'estimate' the $25 figure.
I would start with reading the wattage close to the handle.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
All the electricity these gadgets consume is turned into heat, so in the cold season, they are completely free. Every watt they use results in one watt less used to heat the house.
The same goes for lightbulbs and any other electric appliance except the ones that heat the outside (like the clothes drier)
On the other hand, if you run the A/C for a long time in the summer, you pay twice for the electricity these gadgets use. First when the gadget turns it into heat, secondly when the A/C pumps the heat out of the house.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
I wonder how long he estimated he left his lights on and how long they actually were on. On anouther note I would have thought that an always on device like the fridge would have ranked alot higher on the cost range. I mean I can go weeks without washing my cloths, my friends stay away but sometimes thats a plus. The fridge on the other hand is always plugged in and doing something even if its not cooling. I also wonder if he included the light in the fridge as part of his math for lighting. Lord knows that things always on...
It isn't really that likely, but if you ever needed to go off grid in an emergency, your gas stove, dryer, furnace, etc will be useless if upstream gas production stops, and you can only store so much of the stuff for emergencies. If you had a solar, wind, geothermal, or other off grid alternative energy source, electric appliances will do much better.
Natural gas may be more efficient in the short term, but if you lose your supply you are pretty much screwed (for those appliaces that use it). In your case, you got moved out before it affected you, but if somebody can't move, they might want other options. Again, it isn't likely, and I have gas heat and a gas dryer myself, but I can think of situations where being limited to a resource you can't acquire yourself could be problematic.
Oh, and I call BS on the "can't really cook on an electric stove" thing. You do have heat control, and if you don't, you got a POS stovetop. They may not have the instant feedback of dialing down the gas, but just *plan* a little bit and adjust for the slight cool-down and warm-up times.
Qualitas edurus commercium, nullus penitus net rimor, nullus deus beneficium
Who says no one is? That "heat" is just the entropic byproduct of the physical processes at sub/atomic scales. The Earth is just a vast computer built for pan-dimensional shades of the color blue which look like "mice" in our plane, to compute the question to the answer "42".
Turns out that Life, the Universe and Everything still means something mysterious, but it doubtless means a lot of laundry.
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make install -not war
One shouldn't confuse consumption with waste, he's talking about total consumption here. A dryer running constantly with no clothes in it is wasted power. Yet no one sensible would do that.
Most newer computers can ramp down power consumption when not in use, but they're still using some power. Lights left on when no one around is wasted energy (and bulbs), just as a computer running at full tilt with no one around is usually wasted. But if you're google using however many thousands of computers that they are running constantly isn't a waste.
Wasted power are things you don't see any benefit from. Yes, I could air dry all my clothes, though I live in canada, so 6 (now thanks to global warming 4) months of the year I could air freeze my clothes. So a dryer is an inefficient use of power at least part of the year but it isn't wasted as such. Leaving the refrigerator open 24/7 is wasting power. Running the dryer 20 minutes longer to make sure your clothes are extra dry is wasting power. Leaving a computer running full bore when no one is using it is wasting power. Inefficient power use is when you don't insulate your house (or open air it depending on your climate and house) but they obviously don't work for everyone. Incandescent bulbs are inefficient in terms of power, but total cost of ownership is harder to quantify. I find fluorescents burn out as fast or faster than regular ones, and the fluorescents cost more, that may be a matter of tolerance to humidity, electrical fluctuations and air temperature but I don't know. It would be nice to reduce power consumption but not if it costs me 30 or 40 bucks a month in replacement bulbs to save 10 bucks on my power bill.
You just described one of the many permutations of Enron's business model. All of which hinged on "deregulation", but retained regulations protecting Enron from investigation of their market abuses. Just ask Grandma Millie.
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make install -not war
>I've always been curious why more people don't use gas.
Came home 11pm, family asleep, house full of gas.
Emptied house, shut off gas, cleared the air and sent everyone back to bed.
7AM the next day - threw out the gas stove, removed gas cylinder and had an electric installed by noon.
That was 1980. I've used gas in commercial settings seince then, but never again in my own home.
1 in 4 Maine children in struggle with hunger.
Man, whatever happened to letting kids get hurt every now and again? Guaranteed he'll never touch a burner with his bare hand again.
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Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
My gas stove is 15,000 btu per burner -- that's 60,000 for the top plus another 30,000 for the oven. (Needed a new gas meter when it was installed :-) It's just a small (30") Viking.
If you work out how many amps of current at 240V that would be, it will surprise you -- You'd need to run awg 3 or 4 wire to your stove to get that kind of heat from electricity (without heating up the wires to the point of setting your house on fire).
For those interested in the numbers, it's 109.875 amps at 240V to get you to 26,370 watts == 90,000 BTU/hr. To compare, a typical electric stove of the same size will not draw over 40A at 240V.
Ian Ameline
Slap a carbon tax on Microsoft, Intel, AMD and graphics card makers.
In the end, it's you and I who would pay it. Such taxes serve only to depress the standard of living for regular people and give governments more money to waste on pointless bullshit like lobbying for additional taxes.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
It is theoretically possible that electronic ballasts generate flicker. After all, the AC line voltage is rectified and smoothed with a capacitor before going through a circuit that rapidly switches on and off the current through the tube. Without smoothing, the voltage would vary between 0 and 230*sqrt(2)=325 V (for 230 VAC); with the smoothing capacitor, it would be vary between something like 230 and 325 V. It is well possible that this variation shows up as 100 (120) Hz in the light intensity, although the amplitude of the flicker should be much lower than with a magnetic ballast.
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