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Monitor Draws Zero Power In Standby
fifthace writes "A new range of Fujitsu Siemens monitors don't draw power during standby. The technology uses capacitors and relays to avoid drawing power when no video signal is present. With political parties all over Europe calling for a ban on standby, this small development could end up as one of the most significant advances in recent times. The British Government estimates eight percent of all domestic electricity is consumed by devices in standby."
...when I see CRTs at work lighting up the room when they render "black".
Obligatory blog plug: http://www.caseybanner.ca/
Then it just draws EXTRA power while running, to charge the capacitors. Electricity can't be produced from nothing.
A more useful version would be one that used solar cells on the top of the LCD to absorb the already expended energy of ambient lighting.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I believe the proper term is "hibernate". When my laptop is in standby, it still draws power. But when I close the lid on my laptop, and it goes into hibernation mode, it draws no power until I open the lid again. The same could be said of these monitors. They draw no power until a user does something analogous to me opening the lid on my laptop.
The game.
RTFA. Obviously it can't consume no energy--it just doesn't consume mains energy, and even then, it shuts off if left in standby for more than five days. Seems to me to be a solution in search of a problem.
why can't people just be disciplined enough to switch off their monitors before leaving for home/office?
*AHEM* From TFA:
A new range of Fujitsu Siemens monitors don't draw power during standby.
The monitor might not, but what about the power brick? those things consume power even if no monitor is attached.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
I just want an Off switch on my printers and scanners! Or if they do have one, put it in the front. I use my scanner once a month, it's crazy to leave it plugged in all the time (no power switch). My printer's power switch is way around at the back, hard to reach - I only print once or twice a week. At least my LCD has an off button on the front, but it is never really off.
Most use some sort of supervisory micro or other electronics to sense you pressing the power switch etc. It might draw very little power, but it isn't nothing.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
What do they consider standby?
I guess this is more save the planet stuff.
Now I need to buy new monitors, tv's, vcrs, dvd players, microwave, oven, unplug my clocks every day, etc.. Lots more aluminum smelted. Lots more resources used up. Lots more pollution, but we all can sleep better knowing the residential power demand may shrink by a fraction of a percent.
I'll get right on that after I scrap my relatively new car and buy a prius, and pull and toss all my perfectly functional lighing in favor of compact flourescent. And if we all pitch in, the rate of increase of power demand of this planet will slow by a probably incalculably small amount.
Why do individuals need to change their lives so radically, for an extremely minor, and likely insignificant payoff - all the while lining the pockets of the worlds leading polluters?
If my PC didn't have standby, it'd simply be on all the time, and so would yours - don't lie. This is all getting a little bit silly. Where are the real problem solvers, why are we waiting for government to solve these problems?
My solution? "Consume" as little as possible. I got a ton of shit already, I don't need anymore. We simply aren't going to buy our way to a cooler planet.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
From TFA:
The company has applied for six patents covering the technology and the first monitors using it will go on sale next spring.
I know what they're doing is commendable and all, but COME FREAKING ON! Their solution with capacitors and relays is totally obvious. And if they go ahead and get the patent, does that prevent other manufacturers from making similar improvements? How is this in anyone's interest other than Fujitsu Siemens?
The biggest wastage in taditional designs is that they use switch mode power supplies designed to run at full power. They don't operate very efficiently at very low (standby) power. It is far better to completely turn off the power supply and just use a local capacitor to keep the micro going.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I like this trend. If a device wants to consume 0 power on standby then it finally means that they'll stop putting those damn blue LEDs on everything electronic. Then I could have a dark bedroom at night without the use of electrical tape.
They solved Global Warming(tm).
Give up this crap, editors. My god. Science is science. What the fuck is going on with this human-caused global warming bullshit. This story is contrived to fit that "agenda." I call bullshit on the whole lot of you.
Moe
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
Better would be to simply allow the computer to supply enough power to activate a circuit to turn the monitor on when it wishes to be on - after all, the monitor is essentially yet another peripheral to a computer system. Fujitsu has basically indirectly allowed this by taking the small power of a VGA signal and amplifying it via capacitors, but why not just have the computer provide the full power needed in the first place?
So does that mean I can pull the plug and have the monitor remain in standby mode?
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
Seems important to fix but it's kind of a problem of degree isn't it? Our traditional power sources are running out and our power needs will increase dramatically. In that kind of equation even improving world power usage efficiency by 50% would be of rather minor benefit in actually solving the problem.
How much political power gets directed at stuff like this which could be more properly directed at new power sources?
Most very low power modern devices have nasty power factors. PC power supplies tend to be .6 to .8. CFLs run from about .2 to .6 while many phone charges are about .2. That means for every watt delivered to the phone, there line losses in the grid are at least 3 W if not more. There are also losses in the generator so getting 1 Watt into your phone (or CFL) may require more power than putting 5W into a resistive load.
Yes it's still a good thing, but meanwhile has anyone invented an airconditioner/heater or car that's much more efficient but at the same time as practical and as affordable as the conventional stuff?
My airconditioner uses at least 1kW. 1 hour of airconditioning = 20 days of monitor standby.
For those of you who live in countries that need central heating, the standby power isn't going to hurt as much during winter since you want stuff warmer anyway.
I need a better designed house (to reduce cooling bills etc), but I can't afford one... An "Energy Star" legislation for houses here might be good, but I'm worried the builders will just use it as a way to make a lot more money.
Quick Question:
Do American power points have switches on them? Or are they just live the whole time?
This is more of a stunt. It's relatively straightforward to design the control electronics for a display such that the electronics draws under a milliwatt in standby. The problem is how to get 1mW at 5V or so from the power line. Low-end switching power supplies don't even work right with no load, and better ones still draw a few percent of full-load current when unloaded. So you can't use the main power supply. Transformers have the same problem.
What's really needed are low-cost power supplies for obtaining something like a milliwatt from the power line without wasting more power than they deliver. But they have to be attached to the power line, and need the the protection circuitry and isolation for that. It's not something that can be done with a single IC.
One could power the standby electronics from an ultracapacitor, and when it gets low, bring up the main power supply for a few seconds for a recharge.
From the introductory blurb "uses capacitors and relays to avoid drawing power". Drawing on my memory from my hardware (as in soldering and breadboarding) geek phase (Z8 ForthChip anybody?) a capacitor acts like a battery so all this is doing is storing power before going into standby. That can't be saving power just shifting it around.
.sig - how quaint reminds of Usenet - is that still around? :Q
The next part (my opionion) is the one that makes this work (FTFA)->"Solar panels provide enough power to maintain zero consumption mode". Pretty nifty, I've seen solar panels used on automatic faucets to start the water - of course if we kept the faucets wouldn't need the power in the first place (I know also cuts down on germs, just saying)
So make sure to keep a lamp on nearby (or make sure direct sunlight hits the monitor, always good for usability!)
A
It is not a trivial problem. Most video display technologies need an amount of stabilization to display images accurately. That requires a constant current load, unless you want to go back to the 50's, 60's, and 70's where the TVs have to warm up before you use them.
I agree that most things don't require "stand-by" power. Hell, I have some USB external hard drives where the switch isn't on the actual power supply, but on the device, meaning that the power supply is always drawing some current even though the device is physically switched off.
That all being said, I'd certainly like the option of turning devices off, I mean really off, easily, i.e. not being required to unplug them.
Sorry, it would help if there was a referance to the call to a "ban on standby". My immediate attempts to find this in the media were unfruitful.
Searching google news for a "ban on standby": http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=%22ban+on+standby%22 resulted in only a referance to this artical.
For those of us not in europ and/or not in the know (and who keep our threshold at 4 or 5 because we have little time to browse) is there a referance for this?
Thanks
Okay, so a relay flips the mains power off when there's no signal, and presumably the relay coil is off in this state. But when the monitor comes back on, presumably the relay needs to flip into its on state. Surely that would increase the "on" power consumption of the monitor, making it not very green for high-use applications.
Unless they have a two-coil or polarity-reversing relay and some clever magnets on the relay contacts so one state doesn't need to be constantly fighting a spring.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
The only reason I'm in the habit of turning my monitor off at home is that unlike most appliances, its "standby" mode includes a bright, blue, flashing light. The light is on, solid, when the machine is on, but it blinks on and off constantly when it's in standby. I realize the LCD uses almost no power, but it both gives me a visual cue that the thing is still wasting power, and it actually keeps me awake at night (it's in my bedroom).
But, I'd argue that no matter what the reason that people are lazy, or even whether or not they are lazy, this technology is still an improvement. Really, even if you meticulously turn off your monitor every day, why wouldn't you want one of these?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Instead of storing power in the device, send power to it instead - that is put in a RFID-like receiver that can be energized from a distance, such as from a current-inducing remote control.
... no need to even have a capacitor.
Think outside the box
Ron
You wouldn't even need a capacitor in the sense of storage.
You would just need an RF diode coupled to the video input to be rectified and bias on the gate of a MOSFET that inturn drives a relay to connect mains power to the switchmode PSU.
The crazy thing is, what took me 10 seconds to design in my head will probably be patented, and used to extort millions!!
46137
Is there a really cheap remote power control for appliances that I can control via PC/Linux, which will shut off all power, and drain the minimum while watching for the powerup signal? Bluetooth or other wireless, or even over the electric wires in the wall.
It seems to me like some kind of RFID type passive tech could do this with only the power from a RF signal itself to flip the transistors gating the appliance power on/off.
--
make install -not war
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I'm not sure who, but someone has indeed already invented a mechanism by which a device draws Zero Power when not in use.
It's called ' OFF ' . You may have heard of it.
Huh?
You would just need an RF diode coupled to the video input to be rectified and bias on the gate of a MOSFET that inturn drives a relay to connect mains power to the switchmode PSU.
The crazy thing is, what took me 10 seconds to design in my head will probably be patented, and used to extort millions!!
I'm not sure this would work anyway: in order to power the MOSFET, wouldn't you need a power supply of some sort? Maybe if you used a triac instead, something like this might work.
Thanks, Pauly Shore, for the insight. Who knew you had such range!
I'm more concerned about the plethora of wasteful power-bricks that are trickle-charging all of my devices...
EU _requires_ close to unity (1 +/- 0.1 I think) power factor for all the new equipments _a few years ago_. That's why there is a rush of power factor correction chips etc _a few years ago_.
Governments are good at that. There's no way Europe could ban HVAC devices, their populations wouldn't stand for it. So they go after something that sounds good, but doesn't really help.
It's similar to the lead solder ban. Sounds like a good idea, less lead. Ok fine until you realise that lead free solder has a much higher melting point, which leads to more component failures, and tin whiskers (again more component failures). Oh and of all the lead humans use, almost all of it is in lead-acid batteries. Of the remaining small fraction, only a small fraction of that is solder.
However it is the feel good "We are doing things to make the environment better," that governments can do without pissing anyone off.
The power brick in todays LCD's are usually inside the monitor. This new system just cuts the mains power input to its power brick with relays. Any inefficieny associated with the switching power supply's inability to provide low wattage is thus prevented.
So no need for solar panels.
For one, their math is not based in reality. These are numbers pulled out of their asses, with no backing as to if they are correct. However even if there is some truth, you run in to the fact that most people are using LCDs (and more convert all the time) and most LCDs are backwards. All LCDs run their backlights on full (or rather at the full level the user sets) at all times they are displaying. They work by blocking light. Well, the most common form of LCDs, the Twisted Nematic, are open by default. That is to say when there's no current across the junction, they pass the maximum amount of light. As such to turn black they need full power applied to the junction. They actually use more power to do black then white. There are LCDs that do not work this way (IPS and VA variants) but they are by far the minority on computer displays.
So a "Blackle" would increase power usage on LCD systems, which needs to be factored in.
If these people really care about saving energy, maybe they'd look to things like old, inefficient air conditioning units. ACs use power like no other appliance in a normal home. However there are many different quality levels out there. Good modern ones can move a lot more heat per unit of energy input. This is generally measured in a term called SEER, which means how many Btus of cooling a unit does per watt-hour of energy input. For old units SEER values of 9 or less are common. These days, you can't get less than 13 (by law) and you can get them over 20 SEER. That means that you'll be talking about a unit roughly twice as efficient at cooling. That is some major, major energy savings right there. Doesn't take a lot of that to equal their theoretical Google numbers, and this is backed up by reality.
Unless they are storing power that would otherwise be wasted during the active phase in these caps, I don't understand how they're supposed to make a difference in power usage.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
VGA gets you 1V peak-to-peak at 75 ohms impedance (13 milliamps, probably per color). DVI gives you 5VDC @ 50mA through pins 14 and 15. The latter can drive a relay directly, the former would probably need a voltage multiplier circuit (which at those low voltages could probably be embedded on an IC, in fact you'd probably have to use schottky diodes) to charge a capacitor. Then you could use a voltage comparator op amp to dump the capacitor's energy into the relay quickly.
No signal = No Power.
You could just rig a relay across the video signal line, so that when power runs across the line, it causes the relay to switch.
Now I know how one could do this with a simple relay where this power powered a magnet which moved the switch, but that is probably not an ideal solution. I'm no electrical engineer, but did dabble with electronics in high school, and I suspect there are relay like devices where if you apply power to one side, a switch flips one way, and if you apply power to the other, it flips the other way. This would probably be a better solution because it wouldn't degrade the video signal as much since it wouldn't need it to actually draw power.
Of course it might not affect the signal at all to draw power for a regular relay. I just don't know. But it seems to me that there's no need to draw power to cause a device to come out of standby when a little juice is applied.
Maybe you could even reduce the power draw needed to flip the switch by using a capacitor like a lever. Ie, draw a little amount of power for a longer period of time, then when it maxes out make the switch. So instead of instantly coming out of standby it would come out after half a second of signal being applied.
If anyone is curious, the 8% figure comes from p 43 of the report. It is not sourced, and there is no justification for it. I don't believe it, certainly not without some properly sourced derivation of it.
Sounds like fun (though I'm not into muscle-bound women), but NSFW...
progress
noun |prägrs; prägres; prgres|
forward or onward movement toward a destination : the darkness did not stop my progress | they failed to make any progress up the narrow estuary.
advance or development toward a better, more complete, or more modern condition : we are making progress toward equal rights.
Brit., archaic a state journey or official tour, esp. by royalty.
verb |prgres| |prgrs| |progrs| |prgrs| [ intrans. ]
move forward or onward in space or time : as the century progressed, the quality of telescopes improved.
advance or develop toward a better, more complete, or more modern state : work on the pond is progressing.
[ trans. ] [usu. as adj. ] ( progressed) Astrology calculate the position of (a planet) or of all the planets and coordinates of (a chart) according to the technique of progression.
PHRASES
in progress in the course of being done or carried out : a meeting was in progress.
ORIGIN late Middle English (as a noun): from Latin progressus 'an advance,' from the verb progredi, from pro- 'forward' + gradi 'to walk.'
Transformers tend to be inefficient when drawing very low currents (or zero current, a plugged in mobile phone charger uses power when the phone is not attached), so using mains to run standby functionality will use more power in total that charging a capacitor when the device is on.
This is marked as funny but actually, I do the same thing. I usually have my laptop on because I keep connected with my gf in another city through skype, etc. I have black electrical tape over the LED's on my laptop because the damn things are actually pretty bright. I've noticed that the ones under the screen don't turn off when the lid is down either, but they're not really that visible with the lid closed and the power draw of having the machine on is more than the LED's by a longshot.
Still, I found of a bunch of cheap radio-shack single-plug "protection circuit" units with what appears to be a physical switch. I have multiple adaptors for my laptop through the house, but when I'm not using one I flip the circuit off so as not to waste power (and also give the brick a chance to cool down).
Somebody else mentioned printers, and I'll be seriously considering now adding one on my HP. I rarely print, and I'm guessing it's not really power-friendly in standby mode.
I assume the majority of this 'standby' power usage is not due to monitors but tvs, videos and dvd players etc which are operated by an infra-red remote. The constant monitoring for an infra red control signal to tell them to come out of standby means they are essentially still 'on'.
There are already some nice sized caps in your modern PSU, and while I don't know about LCD's... monitors have some real monsters in there.
Adding a few storage caps isn't going to noticeably add to your load while running. In fact, it may result in cleaner power as caps are often used in conjunction with diodes etc to filter power: diodes to restrict the power to a singular direction, or rectify it, and caps to ensure that the power levels don't fluctuate beyond acceptable levels. This is why people with overpumped stereos often add a bigass capacitor to their car system, because it ensures immediate stable power if there is a drop/spike from the source.
I've just measured this: My Sky+ PVR (that's our standard satellite receiver for non UK ppl) uses 22W while turned on. It still uses 16-18W while in standby! I think this is because it has to keep the TV Guide updated and it also needs to listen for remote-record signals which arrive via satellite. This means for remote record to work, the Sky box must permanently be decoding the satellite signal just in case you want to record anything from your phone. Seems a bit of a waste to me and there should be some way of disabling the features that require the box to need to remain internally powered up. Turning the box off seems to just spin down the hard disk and doesn't really do anything else (you can tell by how fast it turns back on that it never really turned off).
I don't know how many Sky subscribers have Sky+ but I know Sky has more than 3 million subscribers in the UK. Lets assume half of these have Sky+ which I think is probably pessimistic. That means that even if EVERYONE turned their box off, then all our Sky boxes are consuming 24 megawatts of power in standby! That's ridiculous! Yet if you turn your box of at the mains, some features stop working and you can find Sky cut off your service as the box can't 'phone home' to report on what PPV movies you've been watching.
Man, where do people think the electrons will come from? Magic aether? To keep the standby circuit working at 0 draw (integrated over time, as in Watt-hour) instead of +x draw, this capacitor thing will have to draw the +x during the "on" time. What is the advantage? The only one I can think is lowering the "humming" transformer sounds that my house does at night with its dozen pieces of equipment in standby.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Back in the day, devices came with nice red LEDs that didn't ruin your night vision. A nice coincidence with the fact that red ones were the first/easiest LEDs to make.
One problem with blue LEDs is that the human eye has poor sensitivity to blue, at least resolution-wise. There's a great example of this problem here in Jyvaskyla, a bicycle counter installed in a cycle path (probably using some inductive effect for detection, and intended to collect statistics for traffic planning). Its display consists entirely of blue LEDs, which probably looks cool to some people, but it's very hard to read, kind of defeating the purpose.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
The energy used to charge said capacitor(s) had to come from somewhere, not even stopping to mention internal resistance... Better low power-consuming technology, sure, but the caps are a gimmick.
from 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
to 45 2F 6E 40 3C DF 10 71 4E 41 DF AA 25 7D 31 3F
Someone once told me that you can tell how far you are from the earthquake zones in Silicon Valley by the nature of the taps (faucets for Americans). If they're automatic, ie require mains power, you're out of the earthquake zone. Inside the zone, they have to be manual so you can still get water out of the pipes with the power off. Certainly I noticed that the faucets are automatic at the cinema at Great America Parkway down in Santa Clara, but manual in the Stanford Shopping Centre...
I'm constantly annoyed with my xbox because the clock is on a capacitor rather than a battery. If I've it turned off at the wall for a couple of days, the capacitor runs out and the next time I turn it on I have to set the clock. What happens if the capacitor runs out on one of these monitors in standby? Would it require a complete power off and on to activate it again? sounds like it'd need a monitor to check there's power in the capacitor and if not, it'd give some power to it, not only does this mean power has to be supplied to this monitor but the charging of the capacitor in standby mode would waste even more power.
Not quite. A more useful version would be just very efficient in standby, with a centralised and highly-specialised solar power plant doing very efficient solar power conversion that couldn't be afforded in home devices.
In my home we've been aware of these power issues for a while. TV(s), video, set-top-box, dvd player, stereo. All get fully turned off when not needed.
Our digital set-top-box doesn't even have an off switch.. you have to unplug it. Sky box has to be left on at all times to work at all? It seems the law could require these devices to at the very least support a non-standby/fully off mode even if standby were not made illegal.
This whole discussion along with the original post remind me of the old joke about an elephant is a mouse designed by a committee. Standby power consumption is due to people being so impatient that they couldn't wait the 30 seconds it took for an old style monitor ( CRT) or TV or radio toe "warm up". Its also due to people being so lazy as to not turn off their equipment when its not in use. Yes we can come up with all sorts of techno solutions, all of which themselves chew up resources but none of it will actually solve the problem until the cost of those resources becomes so high that people start to care about and fix their own sloppiness.
Sounds like something that was aired on Dragons Den and thought they had the patent...
this also... not hard to find. http://www.thesavasocket.co.uk/press_and_awards.html
No, I'm not a Mac fanboi, but I did have a Mac IIfx. That, in common with most Macs of the day, would draw no power at all in standby mode, but could be woken with a keystroke. There was a relay in the PSU that shut off all power, and a small battery that kept the clock running. The power switch fired the relay in the PSU through a couple of capacitors, enough to turn on the supply for long enough to bring up one of the supply rails and hold the relay on.
Instead of buying a new monitor there appears to be a few solutions you can already do with your existing equipment: There is a power strip available for $30-$40 that monitors the current to one of the outlets and when it goes under a predefined current load it switches off all the others - good for a PC in the main socket and all it's peripherals in the other ones. You can implement a manual remote control of a socket or a power strip by using an X10 control module. You can automate switching on /off peripherals by writing a scripts that are issued going into and coming out of standby / power on off on the pc to turn on/off an X10 socket(s) with peripherals using a X10 "PC" controller with serial / USB ( this is one of my project for this winter).
I'd not bury this under blankets and cloths too much; my previous laptop catched fire just by lying on my bed ; I'm very surprised my entire bed didn't burn down. This problem was caused by bad electricity being fed at that time. It has to be a small problem in the device or the charger, a bad electricity delivery or anything which triggers this event to have your house burned down..
With the latest 2 DVD drives I bought I replaced the blue leds with a green led ; much more relaxed to watch for and finally not something which is lighting up my room till outside with a blue alienated light getting people to think I must have to do something with ET's.
Finally I got rid of the Men in Black too...
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
Is that these devices don't have an on-board power supply. External transformers consume electricity even when the device they are supposed to be powering is switched off. This electrical load is normally included in the figures for energy use while in standby. For these new devices to be truly zero-power in standby, they need to get rid of the power supply. Can they drop the power requirements of an LCD screen to USB level? That's the only universal power supply we have for peripherals right now, and a new one would really end up being only for this, so non-zero.
HAL.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
It's not "keep your appliances with 0W draw during standby" (which, per se, is no advantage at all) but "use a more efficient way to power up your appliance during standby and save x% energy after all" (capacitor vs. transformer). ;-)
You have a good point, though, but I think you could have been a little less rude
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
The cones for blue light are more sensitive to blue light levels, but there are less of them so they render less resolution than red or green. This means that those bright blue LEDs are going to irritate your eyes, and allow you to see less than LEDs in any other color. Yes, electronics with blue LEDs are bad for anything other than the noon day sun.
If they only noticed that when you hide the piece of cheese, all of the power-generators Hamsters stop running, they would have solved this problem a long time ago. Applies also for carrots and jumping-power-generators Kangaroos.
GP is right.
The whole thing is a big disappointment really. First Earth was going to be done in one day. Then 2. After numerous delays, they finally released Earth after 7 days. And all that waiting for what? It's slow, the interface is horrible, and don't even get me started on security. This is supposed to be a 'next-gen existence', and after all that waiting, we get this? I bet for Heaven all they do is switch the colors and make 3rd party addons like clothes harder to use. You guys are free to do what you want, but I'm switching to Buddhism.
Even the transformers on the utility poles consume power without being loaded. Not to mention all of the devices that use wall warts. I have noticed an increasing trend towards the switcher wall warts with newer devices, which is a step in the right direction.
Death is life's great reward. R. Hoek
Back in the day, there was this wounderful device called a POWER BUTTON. When you pressed the button, the power could be switched on and off. Bring back the POWER BUTTON, and have your employees take a 3 day training course on how to use it. Honestly, how lazy have we become. KiwiCanuck
Wouldn't you have to somehow be drawing power continuously to run the timer that decides when to draw mains power?
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
The power required to keep the components live in 'standby' mode still has to come from somewhere. They claim they're using photoelectric cells to maintain power during standby, but it seems to me that you would need more power than can be supplied by any reasonably sized photoelectric collector, and the comment "Solar panels provide enough power to maintain zero consumption mode for up to five days, after which you have to press a regular power button to bring the machine out of standby" doesn't make much sense: if the standby power is actually provided by the photocells then why is there a time limit?
That five day limit implies pretty strongly that they're using power stored in an accumulator to maintain standby mode, and that accumulator has to be recharged from the mains when you plug it in again. The total power requirements over the whole cycle would be higher than actually running it in standby from the mains.
I don't get the joke.. I use a powerstrip for that exact reason: to have a single switch that turns off all my devices I don't need to be on standby. It's the most simple and practical solution.
A power consumption meter is essential to monitor the ghost loads of stuff around the house. The makers of the KillAWatt meter have a new model out so the old ones are just $16. Check out what your TV and DVD player are up to -- they waste just as much power as a monitor. When I found out how much, I put them on a power strip so I could switch them off -- *really* off -- easily when I go out of town.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16882715001
"If you're not passionate about your operating system, you're married to the wrong one."
They maybe don't draw power when they are off but they draw extra power when they are on to charge the capacitors which power the monitor when it is off.
No power saved overall. Move on, nothing to see here.
America, Home of the Brave.
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/bchafy/pstrip/dpmspowerstrip.html
It works with any monitor, or anything else that runs on AC for that matter, and cheap/easy to build.
"On a CRT more current flows to make the screen white."
Only marginally. The electron beam takes very little power compared to the magnets that aim it.
And LCDs can be and are made either way; the one you describe is less common.
Where does the micro come from?
/.ers don't, no matter what they think) then don't pretend to.
I realise that this is the third time that I've posted in this topic now, but FFS people if you don't know anything about discrete electronics (and most
I do know about it. It's my job to know about it. Standby power is part of what I do, I develop electronics for certain types of household goods. What they have done here is nothing new, except perhaps for the solar panel (it's unncessary, probably done for marketing reasons). It is trivial to build zero power standby circuits for most home appliances except those that use remotes to wake them up. It does not require magic, or micros, or cheating the laws of physics, or anything like that, what it does require is usually a little more cost. Hell, the standby power of most devices is double or triple what it could easily be because it saves a few cents, and a few cents on a few million items is a few years salary for a few engineers. In several of the designs I've done I've gone so far as tracking changes which would take standby power from ~1.5 Watts down to 0.2 Watts, they're on the PCB, but the parts are not fitted and the el-cheapo circuit is fitted instead. Because the beancounters said so.
Until governments require low standby powers on domestic equipment (and I mean really low, not energy star BS, although at least it's a start), manufacturers are going to continue the way they are because it's cheaper to make energy inefficient devices.
my sig could kick your sig's arse...
Of course if you wanted to risk electrocution, you could have two contacts - one from the gate of the triac, the other to a current-limited connection to the hot wire. Using your finger to complete the circuit fires the triac. I guess you've really got to want to watch TV to take the jolt from turning it on!
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
What's going on is that your eyes adjust how much light to let in based on, mostly, the blue part of the spectrum. Quite possibly this has something to do with the blue sky. If you live outdoors, the brightness of the sky is what is mainly controlling what you can see. This also lets you see incredibly well under a full moon.
If you have a blue light and a red light with the same candlepower, and light a room with each, each room is equally bright in the absolute sense. But in the blue room, your irises are closed too much relative to the room light, whereas in the red room they're open too much. (So you can see a lot better in the dark, although very strong red light can actually be dangerous as your eyes stupidly do not iris closed as much as they should.)
Or, to put it another way, your eyes take the blue light, multiple it by three, and assume that's how much RGB light is in the room. Roughly. It's probably more like R: 0.3 G: 0.7 B: 2.0, I'm sure the real numbers are out there somewhere.
There's a reason lights just offstage at a theatre are often blue...you can't see as well under them (Just well enough to avoid running into people.), but it 'ruins your night vision', or, in other words, 'fixes your day vision before you walk on stage into the lights'. (While at the same time, they're dim enough that you can't actually see into them from the house.)
Whereas, if you go further backstage, you'll find red ones, when people actually do need to operate with night vision.
And sometimes you find green ones. I haven't quite figured that one out. Hunters use green, I don't know why either. Possibly because so many animals are colorblind, so maybe it works like red and doesn't affect their 'eye brightness'. Whereas I know, with people green does actually affect it somewhere.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you have to put energy into the capacitor to charge it. It's not like the monitor is not using energy while it's sleeping, it's just using energy stored in a capacitor instead of the wall. If anything, this will be slightly worse, as there will be an efficiency factor associated with charging and discharging the capacitor. This just hides the power consumption. It's worthless, right?
Currently hooked on AMP
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Socket_5.jpg
It works for stero systems too.
Most of the power in a CRT goes into the H/V beam deflection electromagnets, not the electron gun. The H/V scanning electronics operate regardless of which color is being rendered.
Not only that: With a flyback system the sweep pumps energy into the mag fields of the flyback transformer and yoke - then that energy has to be dumped rapidly when the beam is swept back. It has to go somewhere.
Monitors scavenge this "must be dumped NOW" energy for several purposes. Most notable: It's what provides the main accelleration power for the electron beam. In older sets it also provided the power for the high-voltage rectifier tube's filament, the vertical sweep mechanism, the audio amplifier. (Haven't examined the circuitry of transistor monitors but I bet it also gets salvaged for more than CRT high voltage there, too. Or perhaps gets dumped back into the power supply for re-use on the next sweep and elsewhere.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
There should be a standard mechanism included with these components for discharging this system when everything needs to be recycled, otherwise there are likely to be some nasty shocks.
Green light is used by hunters and in many military applications now iirc because it provides the maximum detail resolution per lumen in the human eye, so it lets you use the lowest absolute light levels. Also, green is used for any application involving map reading, since red marks on a map (especially critical on military maps) will show under a green light but disappear under red.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
"(instant on luke warm/b. water uses 50% less energy) "
There. fixed it for you.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
C'mon - the solution is obvious!!
.....anyone know the number of a good patent lawyer?
Replace the relay and capacitors with CMOS logic gates.
These gates "float high" - right?
so, connect two NOT gates connected back to back - input of 1st will float high, driving input of second low, and output of second high - - connect this output back to the input of the 1st - and you've got an infinite supply of power! (tap a small amount off when needed - and job's a good un!)
Yes, standby draws power, the problem is that a lot of people will just leave their stuff on and there will be no power savings mode at all.
Ah! So you're saying that, while blue light looks the brightest for the least light, and red doesn't screw up our night vision, (Both of which effects are because our eyes are stupid.) in actuality, vision-wise, you can distinguish stuff under green light better, because you can see more different greens?
Interesting. Is that because we have more green receptors in our eyes? Or they're fine-tuned better? I seem to recall reading something like that somewhere, although I had forgotten until now. It's the reason that 16 bit color is 5 red, 5 blue, and 6 green, right?
And, also, just like there's a theory that the blue sky being a signifier of the overall light level caused our eyes to use blue to determine how much light to let in, I recall a theory that we can distinguish better between green because of the fact almost all plants are shades of green, so it is easier to see through heavy vegetation.(1)
And, as an added bonus, it won't screw up your night vision as bad as blue or white light. (Although obviously we can distinguish stuff under white light best of all, duh.)
1) OTOH, when you consider all the animals that are colorblind in various ways, at some point you have to wonder how much we're trying to find evolutionary explanations to things that could just be completely random.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Seriously, if standby wasn't available then ALL my equipment (except maybe the tv) would be on at full power 24/7 rather then a power saving standby mode which can preserve the state of the appliance/program until needed again.