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The Insatiable Power Hunger of Home Electronics
An anonymous reader writes "A Wall Street Journal columnist recently got his hand on a power meter and decided to write about his findings, the resulting article being discussed here on Slashdot. That author concluded that gadgets are getting a bad rap, and are relatively insignificant power consumers in the grand scheme of things. A rebuttal has appeared, arguing that not only are modern electronics significant power consumers already, while everything else is becoming more efficient, home electronics seem to be getting worse. This echoes the Department of Energy's assertion that 'Electricity consumption for home electronics, particularly for color TVs and computer equipment, is also forecast to grow significantly over the next two decades.' Are gadgets unfairly maligned, or getting an unearned pardon?"
In general, an LCD TV is 2x more energy efficient than a CRT. Modern dual-core processors are more energy efficient then older processors. However, as with all gains in efficiency, we're using MANY more of them. That's just what happens.
"In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe." -- Carl Sagan, Cosmos
On a side note, don't you just love those British 3-prong plugs? Just be careful not to step on one in the middle of the night barefoot! :-)
Or, more generally, don't step on anything pointy barefoot. Time of day and intended purpose of the pointy thing are not important.
Glad you asked. The main reason is safety regulations. Devices that plug in to your household power need 3rd party certification (e.g. UL approval in US). Power supply design is a specialty, and although any EE could do it, not all can do it well, quickly and cheaply. If you (as designer) spec an external transformer, then you don't have to worry about the approval. You just buy an approved transformer and design your device to work on low voltage. This saves you thousands of dollars and many man-hours of time per design by not having to hire an independent lab to verify your safety compliance.
As an additional benefit, you can sell you product to work with different AC voltages just by supplying the appropriate transformer for each market. Plus, when you buy an external transformer, you get economies of scale because it can power not only your devices but many others built by thousands of other firms.
I am not a crackpot.
Obviously! None of them have been plugged in for 20 years! ;-)
Delay is preferable to error. (Thomas Jefferson)