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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.'"
If he hung his wet laundry on that chandelier's hot bulbs, he could save $25 a month.
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He owns a PC and a hard drive. The Wall Street Journal must be paying rather well, nowadays.
Time to get those compact fluorescents. I have them in all but a few of the sockets in my house, and I estimate they save me big $$ given how much we have the lights on (there's almost always someone home, and I'm a night owl).
This isn't a suprise at all. Residential energy use is well documented in the EIA's Residential Energy Consumption Survey. The DOE runs these once every 4 or 5 years. Heating > A/C > Lights/Fridge/Cook/Clothes > gadgets.
Things might change as people consume their 8h/day TV on 60" plasma space heaters.
You need a wife. As my Daddy used to say, "A wife is an appliance you screw on the bed to get the housework done."
I'm about done with replacing the light bulbs (that I can) from incandescent to fluorescent, but we have a smaller chandelier that's hooked up to a dimmer. I generally keep it at 75% of full power. The light bulbs also last longer because (hearsay warning!) apparently, the fact that the lights don't flip on/off immediately helps the bulbs not burn out as quickly.
Anyways, somewhat on topic, I hear that in California all new development and remodeling requires fluorescent lighting. Is that true?
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
I fail to see this article's relevance to the Slashdot userbase. Being nocturnal, underground dwellers we have no need of light other than the soft glow of our displays and diagnostics. As for the rest of our energy needs, we tap into the power grid of the mysterious beings that dwell above us. They provide us with nourishment and also manage the laundry.
There are many tongues to talk, and but few heads to think. -Victor Hugo
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.
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Our dryer died one day, and since it did not belong to us (it belonged to the landlord; he did not want to fix it; long story), we just left it there and started hanging our clothes instead. We were a little irritated by the inconvenice at first, but after that first electric bill we were sold. $25/mo less per month. I made sure to compare all the transmission/generation charges just to be sure it was all from the dryer.
Now this was in 2003. We've noticed that the generation charge has been going up, so that, compared to 2003, we are paying roughly $10 more a month for the same number of kWh (roughly 180 kWh/mo). So you'll even save a bit more now.
Anyhow, that prompted us to walk around and replace all of our lightbulbs with compact fluorescents, and so on (saving us another $10/mo). Considering that none of these bulb have died (save the one that our landlord dropped), I think the $40 or so we put into bulbs has paid us back quite a bit.
I did the same experiment with the power meter. I was quite surprised to discover that under normal load, my Soekris router consumed less than 1W. Very cool. The same can't be said about the laser printer (LaserJet 4M Plus), though. 700W peak, ~30W at idle. We leave that one off most of the time.
I live in Bellevue, Washington, a large suburb between Seattle & Redmond (the land of Evil).
0 03482933_stormmainbar18m.html
Almost the entire city, plus the environs, has been without power for the past 4
days.
Ref:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2
Thus we are major leaders in energy savings!
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
That's better than a 26% per year ROI. The 100 Watt equivalents are about than $2.70 each when purchased in 3 packs at Walmart. I replaced every bulb that didn't have an occlusion due to a light fixture (about 30) in my home for around $80.
It's a better investment than the stock market any day.
The world will not get better through technology. We must seek to be better people.
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.
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.
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he doesnt have a 30" Inch LCD screen as his computer monitor and a dual-core GeForce 7900 GTX with 512 MB RAM and a 7.1 Surround Sound System.
Nah...in the long run, that will prove to be VASTLY more expensive, especially if you ever decide to upgrade to a newer model.
That's why I just live with them....more like leasing with an option to buy.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
The hierarchy of power consumption is:
- Electric heating (resistive heating: Driers, room heaters, heating appliances.)
- Motors
- Lighting
- Consumer electronics.
Electric heating (by resisitance heaters) consumes an ENORMOUS amount of power.
Switching from electric to gas drying (so the electric load is just the motor) will cause a big savings in the electric bill, while the gas bill won't go up anywhere neer enough to compensate. Ditto (even more so) if the house has electric heat.
Same is true of the other heating appliances (hair driers, toasters, stoves and ovens, etc.) But (except for ovens if you do a LOT of baking) they tend to only run a short time so it doesn't make all THAT much difference on your bill.
Motors are the next big load. Air conditioners are the worst, due to the heat pump. But moving anything around (even air) is costly. One horsepower is almost exactly 3/4 KW (and motors can be very efficient - 80s to 90s percent - but they're still not lossless). (Nevertheless, using a heat-pump for HEATING - especially if the weather outside is above freezing or so - uses a lot less power than resistive heating. But except for merely cool days it's still more expensive than gas.)
Lighting is next. Incandescents are especially hot heaters, and the light is the visible part of the hot-wire glow. Much more is heat. Switch to fluorescents (compact or otherwise) and you get about four times as much light per watt. (LEDs may beat that in a few years but right now they're trailing fluorescents.)
Consumer electronics is 'way down there - because it's improved a lot and because there has been serious effort to increase its efficiency and reduce its losses - as well as to reduce localized heating of the components. (When I got my first linux box it was a good space heater - and most of that was the disk drive. Nowdays things take a LOT less power.) With cheap semiconductors modern power supplies are now highly-efficient switching-mode devices, which also helps a lot.
(Other appliances have also been re-engineered for efficiency, so switching to a modern large appliance may save you significant power and/or fuel. But electronics has had a much bigger improvement.)
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Recently I bought a Fisher and Paykel washing machine from an appliance outlet store. It's quite the unique little washing machine. Instead of having a clutch and transmission, it runs off of a brushless electric motor. This thing spins and spins fast! The ending cycle spins the clothing at 1000RPM to sling all the water and soap out of them. Since this purchase, my clothes take about 1/2 the time in the dryer that they used to. Instead of pulling out soaking wet clothes from the washer, my clothes are only a few steps from being dried. I have a dryer with a moisture sensor built in, so they spend no more time than they have to in the drying cycle. I actually prefer them to be slightly damp so that, when they fully dry, they will be wrinkle free. I seem to be saving an average of $10 a month on electricity, and my clothes have never been so soft and clean smelling....
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