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Appliances Hog More Energy Than High-Tech Gadgets
Posted by
kdawson
on Mon Dec 18, 2006 04:38 PM
from the that's-a-relief dept.
from the that's-a-relief dept.
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.'"
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The Insatiable Power Hunger of Home Electronics 340 comments
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?"
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Dual Use Tech (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Dual Use Tech (Score:5, Interesting)
There's really no other way to cook (if you like to cook) than to use gas stovetop. Electric burners suck....just no heat control there.
I've always been curious why more people don't use gas. Is it not readily available across the nation? I've lived in the SE and deep south mostly....and have pretty much refused to even rent from the few places that didn't have gas, tho, I rarely rent in apt. complexes...mostly I rent houses or lived in a part of a house built as a double (common in NOLA). This worked out for me in Katrina...we had 7ft of water at my place, the neighbors downstairs were totally washed out, but, I had the top floor, and nothing happened to my stuff...I was more worried about it getting looted, but, was lucky and got my stuff all moved out before they got to it...
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Re:Dual Use Tech (Score:4, Informative)
Have you tried an induction cooker? I used to think the same way as you, until I first tried one. To my surprise, it is even more responsive than the gas burner I previously had (I don't know how that works, but it does).
I've always been curious why more people don't use gas.
I think safety issues are the prime concern, these days. Cooking on an open flame just seems risky.
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Re:Dual Use Tech (Score:4, Interesting)
Safety is definitely the concern with natural gas. My brother is both an EMS first responder and part-time firefighter. He has pictures of what can happen when your house fills with gas. There was an elderly couple who were killed recently (unfortunately they died after much suffering from the burns, weeks later) when their house filled with natural gas-- the old man happened to be working on his dryer at the time. He finished, plugged it in, and BANG. They found their front door about 50 yards from the building, and all of the condo units in the building ended up being condemned-- the explosion actually cracked the foundation of the building. The fire was so intense that the firefighters spent most of their time putting out the blaze on the building next door which was caused from the heat of the original building. It was a real tragedy.
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Re:Dual Use Tech (Score:5, Informative)
Blah blah blah. I'm the Fire Marshal of a small town in PA. Most fires (not just in my town) are caused by cooking, and have nothing to do with the fuel used. It has little to do with the exact method of heating, its just that its hot. It's normally because of carelessness (especially including lack of maintenence). This includes crappy old gas stoves with no thermocoulpes that aren't properly mainteined. It includes overloaded elctgrical circuits. It includes filty ranges that have dirt and buildup catch fire during normal usage. It includes imporperly installed applicnces that don't vent correctly. It includes decrepit electrical wiring in the wall supplying a 30 amp 240v circuit.
Don't kid yourself that gas is a higher risk. Improperly installed, improperly mainteained, and imporperly used are the real risks.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Dual Use Tech (Score:4, Interesting)
-1, FUD. Ever heard of a Thermocouple [wikipedia.org]? Any modern gas appliance with a pilot light has one. And saying that old appliances can be dangerous is hardly unique to gas.
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Re:Dual Use Tech (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Where electric really suc
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Trust me, they exist. They're also idiotic. It's even worse when the labeling is inconsistent (HI-2-3-LO-WM-OFF) and the buttons are placed over the rear burners.
Re:Dual Use Tech (Score:5, Informative)
You had to pay for the use of gas which was cheaper wholesale (which benefited business that pushed for deregulation) but marked up well over the original prices for residential customers and you had to pay for the billing of gas from the gas marketer which was a new charge.
The deregulation was sold as cheaper gas for all but it ended up costing way more than they imagined, Natural gas prices rose insanely on top of that, and people that couldn't pay for the increase of both had to freeze in the winter.
http://www.psc.state.ga.us/consumer_corner/cc_gas
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You'd be much better off to have one of those solar cookers most of the year- they can hit over 300 degrees in sub-optimal light.
Maybe when solar drops by an order of magnitude in price.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Not saying it's a realistic reason, but seriously, a lot of people are just afraid of gas.
It's not realistic at all. Ever light the pilot light on a furnace or hot water heater? Notice how the switch has three modes: off/on/light (or pilot, pilot-light). In the 'on' mode a thermocouple is enabled. This thermocouple generates a tiny current using the heat of the pilot light and uses that current to hold the gas valve open with an electromagnet. If you blow out the pilot light then the thermocouple st
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Turns out that Life, the Universe and Everything still means something mysterious, but it doubtless means a lot of laundry.
Wow (Score:5, Funny)
He owns a PC and a hard drive. The Wall Street Journal must be paying rather well, nowadays.
Lights? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Lights? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Lights? (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Lights? (Score:5, Informative)
also, someone up above made a comment about LED lights and got moderated troll. he is correct, LEDs are the next thing in lighting, as soon as the cost comes down. considerably more efficient than CFs.
last note. i put CFs in my current house when i moved in 4 years ago. i havent had to replace a single one yet. and i too am a night owl.
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Re:Lights? (Score:5, Informative)
It is a misconception that LED fixtures are more power efficient than CF or other traditional "hot wire" light sources. Compared to your typical compact fluorescent bulb at the magical "100 watt incandescent" equivalent light output, they are in fact about the same. Fluorescent tubes are quite a bit better.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminous_efficacy [wikipedia.org]
There are however some new high-flux LED's in development that are cracking the previous 100 lumen/watt ceiling, but they still have a *long* way to go until they are cost competitive with any other light source.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Depends on where you live, but usually you want to call the people that run your local dump. They will be able to tell you the correct way to dispose of hazardous waste in your area.
My wife switched us completely to compact flourescents a few years ago. It has saved a bunch of money.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I don't work for Ikea, I just like referring others to free resources that help people be more responsible in their consumption behaviors.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It was around $20CDN for 8 of them.
They also produce a nice white light, not yellow!
But, now that I'm not producing incredible amounts of heat from light bulbs, how much more does it cost in natural gas to heat my house?
EIA Residential Energy Statistics are free to all (Score:5, Informative)
Things might change as people consume their 8h/day TV on 60" plasma space heaters.
Use a dimmer (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyways, somewhat on topic, I hear that in California all new development and remodeling requires fluorescent lighting. Is that true?
Re:Use a dimmer (Score:4, Interesting)
Many of the other replies to this post are at best mis-informed. So, here are the facts.
1) Reducing the power to incandescent bulbs via a dimmer does not save money. It is true that you use less power, but as you reduce the voltage the efficiency of the bulb goes down. Wikipedia has an article [wikipedia.org] on this with some handy power laws. If we apply these to the example case (75% of the voltage, assume 100W bulb) we get only 38% of the light (i.e. about what we would get from a 40W bulb), but we consume 63W of electricity. Of course, the bulb will now last for about 100 times as long. Perhaps the original post didn't mean 75% of the voltage, but instead 75% of the light. Doing the maths for this case we get: 88W and 3.8 times lifetime.
Note that the above lifetime extensions are purely a result of the lower voltage and nothing to do with flipping on and off. You will get the advantage even if you leave the bulb on all the time. But, since bulbs cost more to run than they do to buy and replace (except in special cases such as traffic lights) then reducing the voltage is a false economy. You would be better off simply buying some lower wattage bulbs or better still getting some compact flourescent lamps instead.
When I first knew my wife she lived in Estonia and her bedroom was fitted with a very clever scheme for dimming the lights (something which I often wanted to do!). Her light fitting had three bulbs connected to a double wall switch. One switch operated a single bulb and the other controlled the other two. One could therefore have 1, 2 or 3 bulbs and they would always be running at optimum efficiency. I suspect that limited Soviet domestic technology was the motivation behind this scheme rather than power efficiency, but it worked very well. Sadly, although several of the rooms in the flat are still wired for this scheme, you can no longer buy the special multi-wired fittings. I have offered to modify my mother-in-laws new lights, but she is reluctant.
Finally, can I point out that dimmer switches do not rely on resistance. If they did then they would get very hot! Most use electronic components called triacs [wikipedia.org], which are essentialy switches which can be controlled in such a way as to permit current to flow for only part of each half cycle of the AC voltage. This reduces the average voltage and for incandescent bulbs this is what matters.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Most light dimmers actually use a transistor that chops off parts of the AC waveform. Since the transistor is always full-on or full-off, no significant power is lost in the dimmer switch (which would get very hot otherwise). The chopped-up waveform is also the reason you're no
Irrelevance (Score:5, Funny)
Dryer (Score:3, Insightful)
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).
Re:Clotheslines are not allowed (Score:5, Insightful)
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The bottom line (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:The bottom line (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, but they're still working out kinks with the measurements. For instance I bought a dishwasher that was world's better than the competitors on the energuide/energy star scale. Turns out that my dishwasher has a sensor that measures how dirty the water is, automatically (and significantly) shortening the cycle for small/null loads. Turned out that the energy test the government ran did a cycle with nothing in it at all, making a best case.
While the sensor will definitely help, it certainly won't to the degree demonstrated in the artificial benchmark.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
So, if I hand wash the dishes first, I'll save a ton on electricity!
Felt the article was lacking. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Felt the article was lacking. (Score:4, Interesting)
A cable co.-supplied DVR uses 52-53W ON, and 50W when "OFF". (I put a lamp timer on that thing, since I don't record overnight anyway.)
A regular (non-DVR) cable box uses 15-16W ON, and 15W OFF.
An HP4110 fax/scan/printer uses 10-11W ON(idle), and 10-11W OFF. (Ok, not a remote-on device. WTF?)
Stereo, LCD monitors, and CRT TV each uses =1W in standby.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I personally witnessed small compact hifi systems drawing 30W while "off" compared to 35W while on without any load.
His guess about the dryer is spot-on (Score:4, Informative)
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've got this guy beat, big time. (Score:5, Funny)
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!
Estimate 18 Month Payback for CF Bulbs (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Wasting electricity in the winter impossible? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Wasting electricity in the winter impossible? (Score:5, Insightful)
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American style science (Score:4, Insightful)
I would start with reading the wattage close to the handle.
Evidently (Score:4, Funny)
Hierarchy is: (Score:4, Informative)
- 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.)
Was it really your dryer or was it your washer? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:If only... (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:If only... (Score:4, Funny)
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.
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Re:Duh? (Score:4, Insightful)
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